Stefan Cooke Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

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’s The 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.