Luke Derrick has a whole different slant on the meaning of streetwear. It was born of his daily commute on foot from Spitalfields to his studio in Bethnal Green Road—during the wettest summer that Londoners have enjoyed complaining about for a very long time.
Rain Check is his name for his light, tailored summer wardrobe; it shrugs off the inconvenient possibility of poor weather by being deceptively waterproof. The title also refers to the fact that—as a young designer who’s establishing a reputation for reinterpreting Savile Row tailoring—he didn’t want to swerve into making beach-based shorts and shirts for summer. “It’s kind of marrying up this urban functionality against a sort of slightly trudging, kind of, we’re-still-here, we’re not on holiday kind of thing,” he said.
It’s also about his peers in their late twenties—“there’s not much money swilling around,” he said—as well as men on the street in the diverse neighborhood in which he works. This, while having been brought up amongst older generations of men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who rebelled against conventional business suit-wearing decades ago—and yet still have a need for ways to present as age-appropriate professionals.
Derrick goes about pleasing this more-difficult-than-you-think market by sourcing high-grade technical fabrics from Japanese mills. “They do all recycled fibers—[they’re] pretty functional; you can scrunch them up, but then, by their ironing, they have this gloss.” This time, the clothes he worked with have a subtle sheen—“nylon, but it looks like silk”—and in a color palette that branched out from the monochrome layering he’s been known for.
The language of sportswear that most men feel comfortable with is in there somewhere, but hybridized with luxury materials in a way that manages to stop short of the dreaded athleisure. Derrick gave an example of how he thinks: “I’ve seen a lot of guys recently wearing shirts and kind of coats and bombers, and then it’s just straight into a really narrow kind of football jogger legging kind of thing. So we have these trousers, which go into a really tight legging.” That’s a new silhouette: streetwear into semi-formal luxury fashion.
It’s hard to over-describe menswear, especially when its virtues are in micron-fine design details. Yet Derrick’s collection is already speaking volumes to the target audience that cares, possibly with fanatical devotion, about these things. When his first collection (which was his debut show) was bought and delivered to a store in Japan, it sold out in days. Derrick: it’s that IYKYK type of thing.
