Stefan Cooke showed his fall 2024 collection in London to an audience of one. I’d been invited to sit in while he and his partner, Jake Burt, were shooting their look book, featuring a collection loosely based on the citizens-band-radio subculture that broke out into pop culture in the ’70s and ’80s. “It was started by truckers in the States to speak to one another from their cabs,” said Burt. “It was basically a form of proto–social media, before there was an internet. It was free to use, and anyone could do it, and it spread to the UK. People then started to meet up, and they made cards to exchange with each other with their handles printed on them. We found a book full of them on eBay. But it was the colors and the graphics that set us off this season.”
Fun playing with bygone vernacular crafts, plus his sharp eye for turning generic menswear pieces into totally desirable fashion, is central to what Stefan Cooke gets up to. This time that refreshing energy was all over the collection once again, brilliantly pieced together with genius signature twists on rugby shirts, polo shirts, V-neck leather vests, knitwear, and jeans.
Cooke and Burt understand branding so well that they could teach much bigger companies how to generate a youth following as genuinely affectionate as theirs. The negative-space argyle knitwear pattern Cooke hit on while barely out of Central Saint Martins MA (the evidence, for Cooke fanatics, is Look 46 in fall 2019’s Fashion East show) has been widely, shamelessly, copied across luxury fashion since—but those blows never dented their confidence in persisting to own it as a Stefan Cooke signifier.
It’s turned up playfully minimized on scarves, shoe toe caps, and the Mulberry bag collab they did last year (more of this in a minute). This time around it shifted location to pop up in the configuration of four familiar holes on the elbows of striped sweaters. It’s an instant collectible that will be sported by the many fans in Korea, Japan, and the United States Stefan Cooke has accumulated through Instagram.
That’s only one detail that will set enthusiasts running again. Pride of place in this collection went to the trompe l’oeil T-shirt that was actually made of finely sliced leather strips backed with jersey. Dangling from it was a line of colored fabric squares, like—well—a front bustle. How on earth? Cooke laughed and said the idea came about when he was trying out some fabric color combinations, holding them up in front of himself in their East End studio. “And we thought, ‘That looks great, let’s just do it like that!’”
Then there’s their exuberant enjoyment of color. Burt had come up with a whole list of names for ones they’d absorbed from the CB radio cards. It informed the entire collection, from the egg-yolk-yellow appliqués on tailored jackets to the choice, say, of a lavender leather for a raw-edge vest, worn with baby blue jeans.
All this was being absorbed look by look during the shoot at Mulberry’s headquarters in Kensington, London. The company they very successfully collaborated with last season—giving new life to vintage bags with their signature patterns as part of Mulberry’s guest program—had extended the use of their showroom for a day. Such small acts of generosity from large companies mean a lot to emerging designers. Would that more corporate titans had the imagination to think of ways to follow suit—or, better still, to hire Cooke as a consultant or creative director. The caliber of his talent is so blatantly worthy of going right to the top.