Jawara Alleyne AW26 — The New Guard Arrives

There is a moment, with designers who are about to become properly significant, where you can feel the shift happening in real time. With Jawara Alleyne, that moment is now. AW26 — shown as part of London Fashion Week to an audience that had travelled specifically to see it — is the collection where the language he has been developing across previous seasons clicks fully into focus.

The practice

Alleyne works at the intersection of Caribbean heritage and British tailoring — a collision that in lesser hands might produce mere cleverness, but in his produces genuine emotion. The AW26 collection returns to the idea of the church suit: the garment worn by his grandmother's generation for Sunday service, treated here as a starting point for radical structural deconstruction.

"I'm not interested in heritage as nostalgia. I'm interested in it as a living material to work with."

The silhouettes are simultaneously formal and destabilised — jackets whose lapels fold in ways that suggest they're in the middle of transforming into something else, trousers that widen dramatically below the knee as if in the process of becoming a skirt. There is movement built into every garment even when the wearer is standing still.

The future

Alleyne has been operating under the radar in the way that the best designers often do before the critical mass of attention arrives. He dresses musicians, operates with a deliberately small production footprint, and refuses the fast cycles that consume emerging talent. IMAGINE will continue to cover his work because we believe, without equivocation, that he will be the subject of major retrospectives within twenty years.