“I’ve been here seven years, but I really need to find somewhere new. I’ve got so much stuff, I’ve definitely outgrown it,” says Jawara Alleyne, as he leads us through to his studio. Set across the ground floor of an imposing period building in London’s Bethnal Green, the space, which is made up of a series of interconnected rooms, actually feels like it’s on the bigger size in comparison to some of the young designers’ studios I’ve visited, but Alleyne is right.
The beams of light that miraculously pour through its huge windows, on what feels like London’s singular spring day of 2024, highlight just how much stuff he’s accumulated since becoming a resident. Moodboards lean up against walls, art, photography, music, and fashion books are piled precariously on shelves, samples swing from hooks and rails and the backs of chairs, and rolls of fabric are dotted just about everywhere. In one corner, a big horse’s head perches on top of a narrow unit. “I needed a horse for a shoot I was doing a while ago,” Alleyne remembers, “and my friend showed up with this. It was pretty iconic.”
Though he’s still looking for a place to call his new home – the London rental market will do that to you – there couldn’t be a better moment for Alleyne to start a new chapter. In February, at an off-schedule show that saw him take over Westminster church St Mary Le Strand first thing on the final day of fashion week, the designer debuted his AW24 collection. “It was inspired by the hurricanes we used to experience in the Caribbean,” Alleyne, who was brought up between Jamaica and Grand Cayman, explains. “Every year, we’d pray the storm missed our island. I wanted the collection to feel very chaotic, and capture that mood – like the models had just grabbed what was closest to them and thrown it on before taking shelter.”
The Eye of the Storm, as the designer called his second solo collection after leaving Lulu Kennedy and the relative safety of the Fashion East family fold in early 2023, captured exactly that. His signature jersey fabrics were instinctually swathed around the models’ bodies, tacked together with Alleyne’s signature silver pins, to become makeshift skirts and symmetric, swaddle-like tops, while textured tailoring in the form of hooded jackets, beachy, spread-collar shirts, and knee-length shorts came with unfinished hems and irregular seams, added to the frantic feeling of the offering. His ongoing disregard for the gender binary also hammered the feeling home: who’s got time to worry about whether they’re wearing men’s clothes or women’s clothes when hurrying to leave their home in the dead of night, anyway?
Fashion fans and the industry crowd were similarly blown away by the collection, which felt like a big step forward for Alleyne. But his position on the precipice of international stardom was cemented when Rihanna called in a selection of his pieces, pulled directly from the Eye of the Storm offering. That she was photographed in not just one, but a series of looks across the last six weeks would be a coup for any rising designer, but Ri went one step further and called Alleyne her “new favourite designer” in a conversation with Interview magazine that almost broke the internet.
“It was so surreal,” he laughs when I ask him how it felt to see her quote all over Instagram. “She’s always been on the moodboard. When I think of a strong Caribbean woman who moves with a lot of confidence, it’s always been her,” he adds. With the shout-out came a swell of interest from the press and beyond, which even without a Rihanna co-sign, has been snowballing for a while now. Now, as part of a tongue-in-cheek nod to her compliment, Alleyne has dropped a t-shirt plastered with the quote: pre-orders are open now, and as Ri also noted in the interview, there is a dearth of good tops in fashion, so get yours while you can.
It’s part of the reason that Alleyne feels ready to launch the next phase of his eponymous label’s growth, by offering a new, made-to-measure, custom service. It makes sense. With retailers largely consigning young designers to sale or return contracts – meaning that if their stock does not sell, it is returned to them without them ever receiving a penny – and plenty, like Matches, facing closure due to drastically dipping sales, the fashion landscape is particularly precarious for burgeoning creatives right now.
Among many rising talents, cutting out the middleman and offering a direct line for customers is a concept radically growing in popularity. Fabric doesn’t go to waste, the whole process is a lot more collaborative, there is room to experiment, and, importantly for Alleyne, he can cater to a lot more people, rather than having to adhere to retailers’ existing size charts, which in luxury fashion are notoriously narrow. “London has always had this DIY spirit, and this focus on the underground and subculture, so it feels natural to do things my own way” he says. “Fashion isn’t really about what’s going on on the runways. It’s about what’s going on on the street, now more than ever.”
Watch Dazed’s video, which sees Alleyne take us on a tour of his studio and talk Rihanna, punk, and that horse’s head, below, and click through the gallery above to see his latest campaign.
