Sam Smith Is Engaged to Fashion Designer Christian Cowan

Sam Smith is getting married. The Grammy-winning, non-binary British singer confirmed an engagement to fashion designer Christian Cowan in an interview with The New York Times this week, putting an official stamp on a relationship that’s been unfolding in public — through red carpets, album credits, and one very memorable Met Gala look — for the past three years.

Smith and Cowan first went public as a couple in 2023 and have since made the Met Gala something of a shared tradition, attending together three years running. This year’s outfit, designed by Cowan for Smith, took the tribute a step further: a crystal-embellished piece built from 255,000 individual crystals and roughly 2,000 hours of hand-sewing, which Cowan described as “a love letter to the king of fashion illustration, and to my love, Sam.”

The relationship has also worked its way directly into Smith’s music. Their new album, out August 21, marks the first time Smith has written from inside a relationship that’s actually working — what Smith has described as their first record about requited love, after a career largely built on songs about longing and heartbreak, from the breakout ballad “Stay With Me” through the more recent, harder-edged pop of “Unholy.” The lead single, “Everlasting Love,” has an origin story tangled up with Cowan himself: Smith started writing it the night before their first date and finished it only after the two had become a couple. Cowan’s eye color reportedly inspired the album’s title, “Hazel Eyes.”

Neither Smith nor Cowan has released details about the proposal itself, and no photos of a ring have circulated publicly as of this writing. Smith, who came out as non-binary in 2019 and uses they/them pronouns, has been open for years about wanting a partnership built on ease rather than performance — a theme that threads through much of the new album’s press cycle. Cowan, for his part, has built his own design label into a fixture of celebrity red carpets and pop tour wardrobes over the past decade, dressing artists from Lady Gaga to Cardi B before his personal life with Smith became part of the story too.

The pairing has drawn attention beyond music and fashion circles, in part because it’s a visible, long-term relationship led by an openly non-binary artist at a moment when several US states have moved to restrict recognition of nonbinary identities on official documents. Smith rarely frames the relationship in explicitly political terms, but fans and commentators have noted the quiet significance of a mainstream pop star’s engagement announcement doubling as a reminder that queer and nonbinary people build the same kinds of long, ordinary, camera-ready romances everyone else does.

For longtime fans, the engagement caps a relationship arc that’s played out mostly in plain sight: three Met Galas, one spectacular crystal gown, and now an album that Smith says finally has a happy ending. Wedding details, unsurprisingly, are not yet public — though given the couple’s track record, expect whatever Cowan designs for the occasion to get plenty of attention on its own.