Stefan Cooke (Q9214)
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Stefan Cooke is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Stefan Cooke |
Stefan Cooke is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
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.
4 March 2024
Stefan Cooke started London Fashion Week with a ray of sunshine—a collection to simultaneously uplift the hearts of fashion people and make us relax. It’s this magic combination that adds up to a proper talent: Cooke makes clothes that are easy to wear, combined with things that pack an intense amount of head-turning ingenuity.In this case, there were boyish sports-champ references, pastel checked picnic blankets made into ponchos and maxiskirts, twisted and draped tops—and a mouthwatering collaboration with Mulberry, in which the bags were almost as “dressed” in Stefan Cooke as the models.“We just wanted to do something that was confident and simple and new for us,” Cooke said. “It’s always difficult for me and Jake [Burt, his partner] to say what something’s ‘about,’ because there are always a hundred different references that go into it. But I think,” he added, grinning, “we took summer quite literally.”As Craig Green once said, in trying to describe one of his own early collections, “It was simple but complicated.” Cooke belongs to the generation that has essentially moved beyond gendering clothes—the movement that was heralded 10 years ago when Jonathan Anderson caused a furor by putting men in frilled shorts (and then immediately scored his creative directorship at Loewe). So it looks noncontroversial when Cooke sends out skirts and knitted dresses—or elongated sweaters with winner’s sashes—in what is technically a menswear collection. What with the grabbiness of his talent for bags, MatchesFashion (which championed Cooke early on) told him his work has been selling equally to women and men from the start.Cooke’s gift for developing textile techniques was honed at Central Saint Martins. In his hands, “craft” transcends into something far more sophisticated than homespun, though. His collaboration with Mulberry became a brilliant way to imprint and collage his collected signifiers onto objects of desire. There were all the patterns he “owns,” starting with the much-copied negative-space argyle pattern he originally invented for sweaters, carved, appliquéd, draped, or strung onto 27 preloved Mulberry bags. They’d been sourced from its circularity program, the Mulberry Exchange, and then added to by its artisans in Somerset, who worked alongside Cooke and Burt to figure out how to replicate a blown-up motif of military frogging (first seen in last season’s show) and flattened bows (from a T-shirt) in leather decoration.
That looked striking enough, but the dressing didn’t stop there. There were button guitar straps, clipped-on vintage scarves, and chunky tassels made out of shredded rugby shirts, as well as a couple of peaked caps topped with vintage feather hackles from formal military uniforms. “You can buy each one complete, as a one-off,” said Cooke. “I like that everything feels like the real story of several things put together. I think the maximalism of them is what is really appealing.”This was British-born creativity at its contemporary best. Even in dark times, London’s young talents still keep that shining.
15 September 2023
Due to the death of a close relative last November, Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt elected not to show this season. Instead we caught up with them in a Paris showroom. Following last season’s womenswear debut at their co-ed Selfridges show, they also elected this year to step back from the category—temporarily, one hopes—in order to focus on their menswear.Those points of order registered, this was another strong SC collection, which in only a few years of activity has established a distinctly attractive proprietary visual dialect. The designers said that, post-Brexit, most of their production is now UK-based, simply to save on the palaver and paperwork of so-called seamless post-withdrawal trading arrangements (insert hollow laugh here). Still, the quality of the work looked so high they appeared to have negotiated the transition better than most. Burt ascribed part of that to their process: “Every piece is hand drawn to scale before we review and refine it. So we often work around a ginormous piece of paper, drafting everything down to the last detail, before we send it to the factory where they recreate it. That process is important because it means, in my opinion, that you end up with these pieces that are perfectly laid out.”Burt said that a reading of Tom Wolfe’sThe Right Stuff, his book about the test pilots and budding astronauts of California’s Edwards Air Force base, had led to a consideration of US marching bands and the adaptation of their codes of regalia from European source material. The designers took their own archive pieces, disassembling and reassembling them to create substantially layered frogging-fronted jerkins. Shirting featured discreet monograms and their trademark slashes at the arm: a fresh and dressy detail.As ever, the pair were closely informed by vintage finds. A faux-folksy decoration on intarsia knits was inspired by a detail on a faux-Tyrolean cardigan they’d picked up in California. T-shirts printed with an image of an old fishing trophy were linked to the victory-driven inspiration behind the collection: alongside crochet bomber/aviator jackets these worked the designers felt, not unreasonably, to evoke a faintly Buffalo vibe. The finest pieces included a remake of a moldy Swedish medics jacket they’d thrifted; reborn in a check wool with custom hedge-jumping buttons, it looked like a different variety of outerwear, something between a fishtail parka and a Nehru collared work jacket.
Cooke and Burt are clearly both talented designers and grade-A garment geeks to boot. After this absolutely right and proper hiatus season, it would be interesting to see them return to womenswear as well as experimenting further with the articulation of their very specific codes and mindset. Like Wolfe’s pilots they should keep pushing at the limits in search of breakthrough.
9 March 2023
Entertainingly intertwining the twee and the twisted, this Stefan Cooke collection introduced womenswear to their offer for the first time. Explained Cooke afterwards: “It felt really right to do it. We felt the team we had was really right to do it. And we felt like our ideas came through really clearly: we wanted it to be really succinct, but also really tactile. It’s amazing to be doing dressmaking, and Jake studied as a womenswear designer so…” Interjected Burt: “it’s totally limitless.”For women, the pair applied a silhouette we’d seenbeforefor men— the Miu Miu high-skirted minidress—in pieces whose hems included ruffle and ribbon. There were also some excellently innovative but also intelligently derivative twinset zip-up minis. These spoke to the label’s central, knitwear-derived visual language of emptied argyle and tangled cable. The cable was embossed into cracking bombers in denim and leather, and across the glute zone in denim pants. The argyle motif was developed cleverly on penny loafers and a zip-up off-white jacket.The freshly articulated statements were the knotted bows embedded in T-shirts above ruffle minis and fitted equestrian pants for girls, as well as tight tops for boys. A cheekily referential Hermès-ish, Versace-ish silk scarf print centered with a leather cap semaphored its own evocative allusion. A series of T-shirts covered with paillettes over reproductions of cool-but-cheesy (and cheap) pieces Burt had laboriously sourced on eBay were, he said, an illustration of the disparity of perceived value (and they were fun, too). Cooke, Burt and their team delivered a tightly compelling collection.
18 September 2022
The designers showing in London this season are certainly not averse to theatrical gestures. But where many labels seem to be immersing themselves in demi-couture proposals—some with more success than others—Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt took their theatricality to the shop floor. Mining inspiration from visits to costume archives, they applied subtle hints of stage magic to a viable and well-made men’s wardrobe for the perhaps mildly theatrically inclined.“We actually don’t go to the theater,” Burt was quick to admit backstage, but for technique nerds like him and Cooke, the tricks of West End costume departments were a sugar rush to the head. “It’s like a football field for all these clothes that have just been edited for different things over and over again. You find all these moments in them,” he said.The most interesting part of their collection wasn’t the cummerbund tutus, armored T-shirt shoulders, or knitted polo neckpieces—although those elements were perfectly worthwhile and quite sexy styling tricks. What totally stole the show was the painstaking techniques effortlessly inserted between the lines of Cooke and Burt’s youth-driven tailoring and signature decorticated knitwear.One of those techniques was to be found in the white pleated shirt in look 11, unassuming at first sight and then rather mesmerizing. A pattern had been hand-cut into the pleats, which were then ironed precisely back into place to create an embossment. “We’ve been trying to do it for four seasons,” Cooke said. “It took the whole team one week just to do one shirt, everyone shaking trying to get it perfect.” Burt added: “Because if you fuck it up, you have to start all over again.”The swirly, almost Napoleonic trompe l’oeil embroideries on denim were an undertaking as big as that pleated shirt. It was a cording technique the duo had read about in a very old textile book, created from placing rope between fabrics and embroidering around it to create a three-dimensional effect. “But we did it on denim to break the craft a little bit,” Burt said.Floral chainmail tops were inspired by one found in a theater archive lifted from medieval tabard. “It had been used for a play ages ago, but they had edited it for a new production of something by cutting into the chainmail and making it flowers instead. I thought that was so beautiful,” Cooke said. So they decided to make their own.
Looking at the Stefan Cooke collection without knowing the impressive skills that go into creating these unpretentious clothes, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a nice, wearable, realistic collection. “I think that’s totally fair, and I’m really proud of that,” Burt said. When asked if this was business-minded fashion, Cooke nodded. “I think you have to be. At the end of the day, it’s product. That’s what excites us—making good product.” They succeeded at that.
20 February 2022
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.
20 September 2021
A boy in an English tweed varsity jacket–slash–minidress, with a scalloped-edge Fair Isle scarf wound around his shoulders—a stroke of fashion genius from Stefan Cooke. “It was one of those silhouettes that took so many hours of fittings and arguments to get right,” he said. “And the Fair Isle scarf—we lopped off the top of a sweater, and then worked out how it can be knitted in the round.”Cooke and his partner Jake Burt, speaking on Zoom from their new studio in London, were brimming over with excitement as they described what they’ve been up to since last October. Already, it was turning into one of those good-news conversations with young designers in all sorts of places who’ve discovered the benefits of hunkering down, devoting months to developing products, and communicating directly with customers. “We’ve been able to afford to move in here because we actually doubled our sales in the middle of COVID last season,” smiled Cooke. Burt added: “I think we realized that people like the reinvigoration of things that are so classic, but also forward-thinking. And there aren’t so many doing that, really. We’ve decided that our motto is ‘refinement reinforced by repetition.’ ”Stefan Cooke aficionados know that he’s the one who made something entirely fresh, witty, and desirable by knitting negative spaces into grandad argyle patterns. With youthful wisdom, he’s realized the value of not throwing that away. “Our pierced-lattice argyle motifs have almost become a logo, without being a logo. So this season, we’ve just reduced them to a single line across the chest and arms, and in a lighter weight that’s easy to wear.”Having the confidence to play on a repertoire and amplify it step by step is the name of this game. A quick check on the patchworked tunic sweaters that ended in a frill last season shows where the idea for his minidresses started. Now there are versions all over this collection, some made as total knit pieces, marrying argyles to skirts, another in ecru with a Fair Isle collar transplanted below. Yet more are made as sweatshirts and T-shirts. “I guess it’s about being tenacious and working on silhouette,” Cooke says.He also circled back to reintegrate the extreme, skinny, elasticated trompe l’oeil jeans he first developed in his Central Saint Martin’s M.A. collection in 2017. That was always a coded generational signal to him.
“That Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme silhouette that we all loved as kids, but more for us, when it hit the high street, and we were all teenagers at school, wearing jeans with pointy shoes in about 2008 or something.” Again, there were more variants on the theme: normally-tailored narrow black trousers and denim cross-hatched with appliquéd strips.What with the peacoats and tweedy outerwear, the bags with button-straps and tassels, the Norwegian dance shoes and cozy neck wraps, it all adds up to a lot of high-fashion content, with tons of accessible, wearable items into the bargain. Cooke and Burt say they wish they could’ve shown it to a live audience, but then again, not having the expense or pressure of a show has given them a chance to focus in a way they never have before. Could it be that we’ll look back on this year of isolation as the one which actually turned out to seed a better future for young designers like Stefan Cooke? So far, the eager response of his young paying fans across the world seems to indicate a healthy yes to that.
23 March 2021
“It’s like a sport that doesn’t exist anymore,” says Stefan Cooke, “and it’s as if you can’t find the rule book anywhere.” His lockdown story is that he and his partner, Jake Burt, went to live next door to Burt’s parents in rural Devon. “They have a place on a National Trust property which is an old boys’ school built in the 1600s. It felt quite amazing to be out of London. We were outside every day, working in the garden. We’ve never had a time like that since we left college.”The disappearance of the old-fashioned rule book—the insane pressure to rush to a show deadline, for one thing—gave them the breathing space they needed to come back with a collection inspired by the remnants of school uniforms, and a young boy, sideways look at English outdoor tailoring. An old school tie, reinvented as a skinny, scalloped-edged striped scarf wound around a country-check jacket and worn with leggings and a little shoulder bag nails the essence of it in look one: quirky, fresh, a bit romantic.“We were thinking about the idea that schools have Houses, but even when schools might have closed, still all this memorabilia of mysterious sports that aren’t played anymore,” he says. Hence the odd leather head guard and padded Alice band, slotted into a collection that skillfully builds on team Stefan Cooke signatures—his negative-space argyle knits, beaded chain mail tops, and print-collaged pleat-pelmeted tunics. “We wanted this feeling of family heirlooms,” Burt adds. “We found this beautiful shell-crocheted granny cardigan on Ebay, and we managed to get it reproduced. But we also wanted heirlooms in the sense of an old band T-shirt your mum might pass onto you. That’s just as precious.”Part of the magic of this label is how it sweetly strips the underlying brutality from British masculine clothing traditions. Burt pointed out the imprint on the brass buttons they’ve had made for the tailoring: “It’s a hunting button, but the emblem on it is this little girl foraging. We liked the idea of taking a hunting button and turning into something innocent—a different value from hunting. Hunting’s values are gross.” Their little cloth bucket bags are “gathering bags,” inspired by spring and summer country months spent picking blackberries and salad greens from hedgerows.
9 October 2020
Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt called their collection, rather ominously, The End. The words were painted on a handbag like movie credits. The set—empty chairs and music stands—suggested a hall just after an orchestra has left post-recital. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the two of them were looking back and feeling the reverberations of everything they’ve made and achieved since they graduated from Central Saint Martins MA in 2017.“With the end of the decade, we felt like we were ushering out the old,” said Cooke, “and this is the new version of what we do.” Burt chimed in: “Or maybe more professional, in a way.” Well, not so fast. Cooke and Burt have invented much which is identifiable, a configuration of skinny silhouettes and ingenious playing with classic British staples like argyle patterns, tweeds, and funny forms of chain mail, for starters. None of that felt old at all in this show. The trick in any young designer’s career is knowing how to capitalize on signatures.Growing up and struggling with the reality of business means they may be feeling different from the heady days of shooting out of college on a rush of ideas and adrenaline. Nevertheless, if they’re focusing on balancing creativity and wearability, they made a good job of it. The boyish quirky-chic of the pierced and slashed harlequin knits—first of all made into scarves—was joined by new takes on Fair Isle sweaters. The idea of a yoked neckline flowed over into the slash-neck coat-jacket shapes; a neat way of making old English checks less dad-like (with some mini kilts as accessories).Now, the super-skinny Cooke legs are encased in real denim, not trompe l’oeil printed legging-jeans, and that was a stride forward. It’s the result of a collaboration with Lee Jeans, which gave Cooke a free hand with printing, studding, and grommeting with jeans and jackets. A commercial brand relationship, then. Surely this is the beginning of a new chapter, rather than an end.
5 January 2020
Stefan Cooke and his partner Jake Burt have been so applauded since they stepped onto the fashion stage that they’ve had a funny sensation that they’re still role-playing the part of what “designers” are meant to be. The spotlight trained on what Cooke and Burt do is well deserved: the believable young masculinity their collections portray, its basis in inventing techniques that recast the structure of familiar garments—like the wonder they bring to the humble argyle sweater—and their playful knack for trompe l’oeil prints. All this, and a precocious talent for creating stuff that is so clearly wearable.So, anyway: The wunderkind double act thought about backstage theater and costume as a theme for the first stand-alone Stefan Cooke show. “Really, it goes back to costume, to acting—to us learning how to be someone over the last 15 months,” said Burt. “It’s like us, really, people think you’re a certain way,” Cooke added. “And the reality is, we’re still living in a flat with two other graduates.”They’re not moaning—and if they’re feeling the pressure, it only resulted in another uplifting collection that combined grandly romantic gestures with progressing and refining what Stefan Cooke is known for. The importance of primary research is drilled into Central Saint Martins students—one reason that they visited “a lot of costume archives, and we liked the idea of replicating something we saw from the 15th century—but with only 20 pence to do it.” So they printed scans of antique pieces onto canvas, and cinched the fronts of jackets with cross-laced corseting. That was the start of putting together a coherently delightful top-to-toe look that tethered delicacy to a brilliant color sense: pink, lemon, red.The other part of the energy came from keeping eyes open on their first trip to New York—Matchesfashion.com, early champions, took them to meet the press a few weeks ago. London kids looking at New York kids in the streets, they were impressed by the precise way guys in the city will pair sweatpants with something more flamboyant. It was plain to see that the hybrid jersey-trousers they came up with will be immediately leapt on; so too, everything they took forward with their “negative space” lattice-effect argyle sweaters.Being able to soar creatively while remaining grounded and in touch with reality is probably as much a mark of exceptional talent among young actors as it is with fashion designers. Either way, it’s about making a human connection.
With Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt, it comes down to this: “We asked ourselves, what would we want to wear? We want to evolve this brand so it’s accessible to a lot of people.”
9 June 2019