Wandering around the studio of Yaku Stapleton feels like falling down the rabbit hole into a real-life Yoshi Falls. On a Thursday morning in September, the St. Albans-born designer and NEWGEN recipient is in a sprightly mood, taking me on a heady whistle stop tour of a space filled with all sorts of ephemera from silver PlayStation controllers to Toxic Waste-green tulle. Calico scraps litter the floor, while a pair of camo Nike Air Maxes perch atop a gargantuan pile of red and green fleece. Keeping watch are two sculptural figures with the diminutive stature of traffic cones, one of whom wears a dinosaur mask. “I’ve just realised this one is missing a bit of its ear,” Yaku says with a laugh. “We’ll just cover that back up.”
The last four years have earned Yaku’s fantastical designs a slew of industry awards. In June, he was announced as part of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN; I am catching up with him before his SS25 presentation, which took place on Sunday at London Fashion Week. Immersed in a futuristic fairytale, Yaku’s cast of characters read books, tied ribbons and even brandished swords in a universe that was the closest thing to LARPing London has seen all fashion week. Like the gentle environs of a Studio Ghibli film, the designer’s was a world so spellbinding it felt hard to leave.
The presentation was Yaku’s biggest stage to date, as evidenced by the hard, all-hours work in the weeks leading up to it. As soon as we sit down to chat, two interns call. They’re currently at Vega Textiles in Tottenham and need Yaku’s go ahead on fabric quantities. “We’re getting loads of fabric for the set design,” he explains. The designer’s full name, Yakubu, which translates to ‘gardener’ and a ‘helper of things to grow’ couldn’t be more fitting. He’s committed both personally and professionally to cultivating his surroundings – whether in his garment construction, design development or growing his 10-person team.
“SS25 is definitely the same world, but now I’m bringing that darkness in through design.“
The people close to the designer crop up in his designs, too, though you might not know that at first. In the studio, Yaku shows me a six-armed puffer that looks like winter attire for a humanoid insect from a B-movie – you wouldn’t guess it’s his younger brother Amir, but it is. Other family members (sisters, grandparents, and cousins) also inspired his SS25 line, the fourth chapter in a series of collections called Looking Back to Look Forward to Look Back Again, which explore themes of suppressed joy – and how to seek a way out of this repression. He recalls a conversation with his grandfather that sparked the inspiration for this season. “He was serious in everything; in how he led the family, how he went to work, how he came back from work,” he says. Then, once his grandfather had retired, a new, more youthful, joyous and charming man emerged.
For SS25, Yaku expands his colourful universe in an evolution of the Afrofuturism explored in his MA graduate collection at Central Saint Martins. “It’s most definitely the same world, but now, there’s more experiments and [focus on] bringing that darkness in through design,” he says. Yaku is contemplating invasive questions such as, ‘Am I making entertainment out of my Black experience?’ while he plays with the zip of his ‘Jamaica’-emblazoned jumper. With time, the designer is getting better at articulating what the cultural aesthetic means to him. “This allows me to redefine what it means to me,” he says. “I noticed gaps in science fiction, and Black people were never in it, or they were just never the guy.” In Yaku’s world, they are always the protagonists.
At the designer’s London Fashion Week debut, attendees were transported into new terrain via three separate sets, with actors-slash-models doubling as characters in the immersive experience. Materially, Yaku also treaded new territory. “We’ve been working with linens, which is something I never thought I’d do,” he says. “It’s been really fun. It’s such a joy to dye and work with the manipulation through colour – something I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy or would work, but we will continue to do.”
Getting on the schedule was, as it is for all young designers, a challenge. Thanks to the British Fashion Council’s support, Yaku is a NEWGEN recipient, significantly cutting some of the pressure and increasing the visibility of the emerging brand. “It is strange to now have an audience,” he says. “People are contacting me who I didn’t even know looked at the schedule. It’s weird. We’re still working, and we’ve still got to deliver all the things that we need to, but it adds a layer of ‘officialness’.” This formality is a level up from how he’s previously presented collections. “The opportunity to just create for another 18 months is crazy,” he says, “it’s a game changer.”
“Overall, this is nuts,” he continues, surrounded by set design worthy of your weirdest dreams. “But there’s nothing else I want to do.”
Text: Aswan Magumbe
Photography: Ali Foroughi