Mohair blanket plaid skirts with swathed jersey yokes, skinny jeans decorated with trad silk headscarf cutouts, mini vest dresses with flippy handkerchief hemlines—Stefan Cooke and his partnerJake Burt are stepping up their womenswear. Girls have been almost as keen to buy their stuff as their male fans since the get-go, so that’s all good news.
This season’s lookbook shoot was happening in the garage of the building the designers occupy at 25 Corsham Street, N1, last weekend. That address is worth spelling out, because on some Saturdays it becomes Jake’s, an ad-hoc shop curated by Burt, selling whatever they have at the moment, vintage bits they fancy, and what they’re learning people want. He has an Instagram page dedicated to what’s in store to tempt their followers. “It feels very tangible,” said Cooke. “Because everything stopped feeling tangible to me, which I don’t like at all.”
Resilience and resistance to difficult times always comes in unexpected and DIY forms amongst young Londoners. Actual shop-keeping (creating your own market!) is the one springing up in the vacuum created by the problems of e-commerce and the general aridity of single-brand luxury fashion stores. “It’s really fun. I love doing it,” says Burt. “We’ve realized that it’s part of this route that people are on, on a Saturday; there’s the book shop nearby, and a record shop, and they come to Jake’s, and maybe go to the bakery and walk up to London Fields.”
It’s part of the reason they’ve been encouraged to step up their womenswear. Getting to know your customers, what they like and what’s good or faulty about the fit of your product is something that can’t be done through third parties, and not through a screen either. Burt has been seeing an enthusiastic response to “specific bits of women’s tailoring and the rodeo shirts that I’ve been doing. Loads of it’s just deadstock fabrics, as well.”
Keeping cash flow going as well as creating a micro community culture is the underpinning of the online lookbook. Not letting a good signature idea go (i.e. what people loved you for in the first place) is one of the pair’s talents. So, sure enough, the jacket-skirt is a centerpiece of this season, this time reiterated as a red Harrington with a double-layer of vintage rugby shirts sewn into the inside hem. So clever, so simple: it’s a freeze-frame of how people actually wear clothes.
You can’t see it in these pictures particularly, but they’re also keeping up the negative-space argyle cutouts as a prime Stefan Cooke signifier. They’re on the backs of sweater sleeves and on the back collars of what are definitely the best women’s things in the collection: cashmeres which appear to be matching tops and skirts, but are actually dresses. They’re also cut into the sides of the new suede and leather Stefan Cooke trainers.
Several young London designers have opted not to show this season, but that’s not the case with Cooke and Burt—they haven’t held a live runway event for over a year. Apart from turning IRL shop keepers in that time, they’ve also done a collaboration with the Korean menswear brand Solid Homme, and traveled in Korea and Japan. Meeting people who are mad about Stefan Cooke in Asia also gave their confidence another big shot in the arm. They’ve had a long-distance relationship with young Korean and Japanese fans since the pandemic. For them, the experience of lockdown actually had the effect of increasing their global reach to fanatical collectors across the world. It was their fall 2021 collection that really did it, the one where people went nuts for the tweed-bombers-with-attached-skirts idea that’s looking just as original and fun, four years later. There’s a lot to learn in all of that.
