Stefan Cooke started London Fashion Week with a ray of sunshine—a collection to simultaneously uplift the hearts of fashion people and make us relax. It’s this magic combination that adds up to a proper talent: Cooke makes clothes that are easy to wear, combined with things that pack an intense amount of head-turning ingenuity.
In this case, there were boyish sports-champ references, pastel checked picnic blankets made into ponchos and maxiskirts, twisted and draped tops—and a mouthwatering collaboration with Mulberry, in which the bags were almost as “dressed” in Stefan Cooke as the models.
“We just wanted to do something that was confident and simple and new for us,” Cooke said. “It’s always difficult for me and Jake [Burt, his partner] to say what something’s ‘about,’ because there are always a hundred different references that go into it. But I think,” he added, grinning, “we took summer quite literally.”
As Craig Green once said, in trying to describe one of his own early collections, “It was simple but complicated.” Cooke belongs to the generation that has essentially moved beyond gendering clothes—the movement that was heralded 10 years ago when Jonathan Anderson caused a furor by putting men in frilled shorts (and then immediately scored his creative directorship at Loewe). So it looks noncontroversial when Cooke sends out skirts and knitted dresses—or elongated sweaters with winner’s sashes—in what is technically a menswear collection. What with the grabbiness of his talent for bags, MatchesFashion (which championed Cooke early on) told him his work has been selling equally to women and men from the start.
Cooke’s gift for developing textile techniques was honed at Central Saint Martins. In his hands, “craft” transcends into something far more sophisticated than homespun, though. His collaboration with Mulberry became a brilliant way to imprint and collage his collected signifiers onto objects of desire. There were all the patterns he “owns,” starting with the much-copied negative-space argyle pattern he originally invented for sweaters, carved, appliquéd, draped, or strung onto 27 preloved Mulberry bags. They’d been sourced from its circularity program, the Mulberry Exchange, and then added to by its artisans in Somerset, who worked alongside Cooke and Burt to figure out how to replicate a blown-up motif of military frogging (first seen in last season’s show) and flattened bows (from a T-shirt) in leather decoration.
That looked striking enough, but the dressing didn’t stop there. There were button guitar straps, clipped-on vintage scarves, and chunky tassels made out of shredded rugby shirts, as well as a couple of peaked caps topped with vintage feather hackles from formal military uniforms. “You can buy each one complete, as a one-off,” said Cooke. “I like that everything feels like the real story of several things put together. I think the maximalism of them is what is really appealing.”
This was British-born creativity at its contemporary best. Even in dark times, London’s young talents still keep that shining.
