Last season was a big one for Yaku Stapleton, not least because his namesake brand was reviewed and featured on the homepage of this very site for the first time. In the months since, the designer, who graduated from the Central Saint Martins MA program in 2023, has completed a residency at the Paul Smith Foundation (although he is still receiving support) and signed a deal with Nike. Essentially, he has been learning what it’s like to run a business alongside building a brand.
“A lot of the thinking for this collection came from not being able to see it in its entirety,” said Stapleton during a preview. “On a practical level, you have to just be in so many directions in order to run a business. And by the time we wrapped last season, it was time to create again. It takes a while to get in that zone for the ideas to come.”
But boy, did the ideas come. Where September’s show was about exploring Stapleton’s roots as well as an imagined island inhabited by a people called the Télavani, this season was about fighting and protecting. “What happens when history is repeatedly ignored by those who have a fundamentally different relationship to growth and survival?” asked the show notes.
The team focused on two brother characters, Amir and Nathaniel, who are the warriors of the family Stapleton bases his world on (and who, in turn, are based on Stapleton’s own family). “We hyperfocused this season because we felt ready to treat fighter archetypes in a considered way. It would be easy to get sucked into the generic-ness of battle and swords,” he said.
So the NewGen space at 180 Studios where the performances took place throughout the afternoon were taken over by papier-mâché soldiers—some in the middle of the room in a kind of resting formation, others appearing to fight each other on the walls and the ceiling. When the show started, Stapleton’s full cast of professional dancers moved around the space in sequences inspired by the martial arts of the Caribbean.
The clothes themselves felt heavier and armour-like. This time around, the pecs that had been printed on T-shirts last season were placed on a turquoise top reminiscent of those foam superhero costumes that make kids on Halloween look like they have muscles. It was paired with an enormous pair of trousers, turned even more humongous by an overlapping skirt of fabric swords. (It’s Look 13 and my personal highlight.)
There were also T-shirts with armor prints, hooded bombers of waxed cotton, and acrylic hats that carried the faces of characters with names like “Bug Eyed Creep.” Of course, there was also a horned and thorned sweatsuit made of upcycled cotton as part of the aforementioned Nike collaboration (launching May 2026).
Stapleton has a lot to say and even more to do in the seasons ahead. He also has a devoted business partner in Nas Kuzmich, who looks after the operational side of things, and that is always an asset. It will be exciting to see where they take things next.
