How about blatant glamour as a phrase to get the pulse racing? Is this not what we’re all after, in one way or another? Stefan Cooke and his partner, Jake Burt, didn’t exaggerate when they dropped those words into the description of their collection—it was one of those occasions when mouths gaped open at the skill and originality of a fully formed, completely desirable vision of fashion walking by.
Just take it from the bright white torso-hugging, zipped-up leather shirt that seemed as if it might be a ribbed knit at first, but turned out to be made of vertically slashed strips of leather with delicately serrated edges—and which also seemed to be connected to a white fringed peplum. But then that again was an eye trick, being in fact a wraparound print on the top of a pair of trousers. Whoa to Look 31. And whoa to the rest of what Cooke and Burt did: argyle knits that left peepholes in the lozenge patterns; seamlessly fitted jersey trousers made in that vertically slashed leather; silver chain-mail stoles casually flung over tailoring; ingeniously slashed English dad coats—the lot of it, actually.
But how did they do that? Backstage, Cooke and Burt were bubbling over with irrepressible glee in describing how they came up with the leather technique—the last look, a red coat, was concertina-ed across the musculature of the model’s back, to show bare skin in a diamond pattern. “Well, it was finding an old Chelsea boot from a charity shop and looking at its worn-out strips of elastic,” Burt began. “And then we got this Lycra and applied the leather on top,” said Cooke, “and then we sliced it all through with rotary pinking shears!” Presto! The discovery of a technique that invents incredibly chic male leggings (meggings?) and other garments that stretch to show either a different base color, or skin, as they move.
It didn’t for a second read as a textile-geeky gimmick. These things sometimes do. Nope: The amazing surface effects were trained to engineer an impressive, sexy, classy sense of the way a young man would kill to look.
Cooke came out of the Central Saint Martins M.A. program in 2017 and got together with his school friend Burt to start presenting his body-hugging trompe l’oeil preppy-classic silhouettes on the Fashion East runway. The challenge with coming up with a brilliant idea over five years in college is: What will be your next trick? Some people only have one. Cooke and Burt proved with this collection that they have the rare dynamic talent to keep coming up with new ideas, while twisting and twirling around their original ones—like minimizing, exploding, or cutting out their argyles, or messing about with chain mail in unique ways.
This is the last of the three-season Stefan Cooke tenure on the Fashion East runway. That’s why, Cooke laughed, they came up with the wacky colored wires draped on some of the boys: “We thought they looked like party streamers!” These two can allow themselves a moment to celebrate. They have their heads screwed on: a vision of being able to make small orders of their high-intensity, elaborate pieces, and then being able to offer the printed things at more accessible prices. It’s the fun and uniqueness that will give them a bright future. Burt put the attraction in a nutshell: “We’ve placed everything really, really carefully on each garment. Like, we were the ones that placed it on you and no one else.”
As Lulu Kennedy is waving off the Stefan Cooke duo, she’s also waved in two newbies this season. Robyn Lynch is an Irish designer from Dublin who opened her show with a collection color-coded to her memories of her dad and his friends visiting the Dublin Games. Mowalola Ogunlesi is the Nigerian Londoner at the center of a black music and club scene that is becoming unmissable. She graduated Central Saint Martins with a B.A. two years ago with a slick, raunchy collection for men—and with this first stand-alone collection, Exposed, she escalated it for all genders. “In my country, I grew up with sexuality being very judged. So I wanted to transform people’s ideas of what sexy is. That it’s okay to show skin.” And then she laughed: “They’re clothes you want to get fucked in.” Two very different angles on “blatant glamour“ in one night, then.
