Masculinity and schooldays have been a topic of the men’s shows in London. “I suppose we were looking back at our teenage years,” began Stefan Cooke’s partner Jake Burt. “I think lots of people are—because what else can you do?” Cooke, 29, and Burt, 30, have been reminiscing about their first experiences of fashion, which involved the heady excitement of discovering high street shopping in the early 2000s. Those were the days when Top Man, Abercrombie & Fitch and Jack Wills ruled fashion for ordinary adolescent boys in the UK. Reference-wise, it was a switch-around, they said, because until now, Cooke’s brand was always inspired by old established British classic menswear. “But we don’t really belong to that. And I think instead of referencing wealth and money, there’s something really amazing about looking at, literally the people around you, and really focusing on what the majority of people wear,” he said.
If their other agenda was to come back to the runway with full-on commercial Stefan Cooke brand clothes, they succeeded. What with all the leg exposure—the tiny shorts trend, pushed to an extreme with cut-off tracksuit bottoms, and the bandage-tops—there was a sexiness about it which parallels all the body-revealing strategies that are going on in young womenswear.
They made fun of logo-mania by inventing their own silhouettes of two dancing women, to stick on the front of a sweater and on a white rugby shirt. In knitwear—a Stefan Cooke strength—there was the sense of an ironic blanded-down argyle pattern that knocked themselves off, as if it was somehow a noughties high street collaboration. Their brash Union Jack flag sweater might call up affectionate childhood memories of Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls wearing her Union Jack mini dress in 1997—a mass tabloid pop culture moment if ever there was one. But in post-Brexit Britain, the flag is chiefly being used as a cipher for right-wing populism, and that’s more divisive in 2021.
Fair enough that Stefan Cooke wants to make more iterations of his brand inventions: the chainmail, the handbags, the printed shirts and T-shirts, and the bandage technique he once used to create the illusion of skin-tight jeans. What was missing this season was the sense of the innovation, the focus on finding something new and astonishing to do with British craft and hand work that singled out Cooke as outstanding talent in the first place. It’s the one thing that the high street—now renamed fast fashion—can never do, and which keeps Cooke’s renown up there in luxury fashion.
