The opening hours of London Fashion Week proffered an image that will no doubt be one of this season’s most widely circulated: King Charles III, the incumbent British monarch, walking across the Mozart Estate, the West London housing project where designer Tolu Coker grew up—or, rather, a recreation of it: basketball court, community mural, and all.
While there are precedents for such appearances, having senior royalty turn up to your show is a big deal, no matter your stance on the institution. His Royal Highness’s appearance here, however, was all the more poignant for the fact that when Coker “wanted to start the brand, one of the first things I did was I booked onto a four day course at the [then] Prince’s Trust,” the now-King’s charitable youth development initiative.
What gave the snapshot—of the figurehead of arguably the world’s most prominent monarchy hanging out on Coker’s “block,” as she lovingly dubbed the scene—greater poetic resonance was how succinctly it distilled the complex, often contradictory facets that come together to create modern Britain. “This is England!” was its clear statement, clear as day.
Since founding her namesake brand in 2018, Coker has garnered acclaim for her technical nous; her sculptural ’60s-inspired tailoring is some of the sharpest you’ll find among this town’s independent talents. She’s also an incredibly deft, critical thinker, her collections often allegorizing knotty societal conditions—specifically those pertaining to Britain’s urban Black diaspora—through the prism of personal and familial histories. This has made Coker something of a poster figure, her work often perceived in terms of its abstract, representational value rather than the personal nuances that fuel it. This latest collection, though, was almost defiantly auto-biographical, a voicing of a personal history on decidedly personal terms.
While the set may have prompted some to don their socio-anthropologist specs, Coker’s intention was to immerse audiences within her lived experience. “In conversations around the context of the working class and social mobility, it’s always from a spectator’s position,” Coker mused in a pre-show preview. “With this, I just want people to hang out on the block—to see what it was like to just be in that space.”
The latest self-reflexive turn in Coker’s practice—building on her last collection, a contemplation of the projections, expectations, and lived realities of Black British women—‘Survivor’s Remorse’ sees the designer hark back to the late ’90s and early ’00s of her formative years.
She conceived of the collection as a material expression of her experience moving between worlds: the West London council estate that her close family and friends still call home, and the haughty world of luxury fashion; milieus historically pitched as irreconcilable. “They may appear two completely different worlds on paper, but the reality is that [the former is] the space that has incubated me, held me, grown me, and groomed me to be able to make luxury women’s wear and tailoring,” she countered.
The clothes themselves are testament to that. If the collection was an exercise in sartorial code-switching, it was mixed with a warmth, sentimentality and wit. The opening looks saw Coker’s signature silhouettes—waisted minidresses with puffball sleeves; round-shouldered tailored jackets with skirts with flounced hems—rendered in stern black taffeta, introducing a somber maturity to a scene that otherwise suggested an adolescent nostalgia. They were counterposed by similar forms in joyfully bright schoolgirl plaids, with bright shirts featuring elongated cuffs and roomy gray wool tailoring reading of cherished hand-me-downs, or perhaps pieces lifted from a dapper older relative’s wardrobe for a given occasion. “I was thinking about times when you’d borrow granddad’s jacket for your first proper job interview,” Coker chuckled, “or you need to borrow a shirt.”
This sense of contrast expressed itself through material choices, too. Corseted leotards with dimensional hip constructions and swaying peplums were crafted in sober gray tailoring wools and houndstooth denims. Elsewhere, hooded jackets and track pants came in visibly weighty taupe felt, their expected casual fit elevated with darts at the bust, skimming seams, and sensuous cutouts at the hip. “I was thinking about materiality and this idea of the tracksuit, but what does that then look like for someone mobilizing?” Tolu asked. “How do you give something like that a tailored sensibility and a sense of shape, while maintaining that comfort?”
While this was a collection rich with “little nods and hints at where you’re from,” it was more than an act of doe-eyed retrospection. Rather, it underscored a serious, motivating ambition. “I believe in reformative luxury,” she said, which is a concept centered on the rooting of luxury “back in heritage,” irrespective of what that heritage is. For Coker, that entails reframing and reassessing enshrined benchmarks of aspiration. In recognizing that “just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, people aspire to different things,” she’s able to cater to aspirations long overlooked.
Granted, this collection proved Coker capable of creating universally admirable clothes—and gauging by his jolly countenance throughout, HRH agreed. Still, what really makes them worth celebrating is how unequivocally they venerate the women they’re both inspired by and made for. “This season, I found myself asking: Who are the Tolu Coker women? I understand how much my dresses retail for, and I know that the women who wear them are in a space that many women aspire to,” she said. “But they’re also clothes for the woman who’s socially mobilising, but perhaps isn’t quite there yet,” clothes that allow people to transcend and step into different rooms. “I’m dressing that woman, and I’m an advocate for her. That’s the heritage I want to create.”
