Thirty-four-year-old Jawara Alleyne is proud to count Rihanna as one of his eponymous brand’s biggest fans (she launched Alleyne into the spotlight by wearing his custom-made “joint-dress” for Dazed magazine in 2021).
“I’m always looking towards Rihanna to see how you cross over reggae into dancehall, into punk rock, into sort of pop — how you blend those genres,” Alleyne says from his east London studio, where he is making the finishing touches to his SS26 collection before his show on September 21. Other high-profile clients include South African singer Tyla, Londoner Joy Crookes and Shakira, whom he has designed outfits for on her ongoing world tour.
In 2020, his MA Fashion graduate collection called “(Self) Made Man” put him on the map — a sea of vivid satin, deconstructed denim, quirky accessories and exposed torsos which referenced the island style of his childhood.He was then plunged into Covid, “when I started to understand the value of just being able to make things with my own two hands”. Some of his earliest designs — patched, pinned denim paired with his recognisable layered T-shirts, cropped tuxedo jacket and red blazer — are currently on show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, this year’s Met Gala exhibit, which “felt really important”.
“It’s very rare that menswear gets that focus and in particular the black space of menswear,” he says. As for this season, “it’s less about industry and more about community”, he says, in high spirits and surrounded by his fitting models. Titled Tabanca, “the feeling that you get after carnival has ended”, he explains, “it’s inspired by carnival, but not so much by how you would stereotypically think.”
It comes off the back of Alleyne hosting a Notting Hill Carnival barbecue, and producing a capsule Converse collaboration where shoes came adorned with torn, brightly coloured strings of off-cut fabric.
He will also use the show to debut two T-shirt capsules: one using celebrated Caribbean artist Guy Harvey’s marine imagery, connecting cultural memory and conservation, and another with the Japanese rock band Bo Ningen. Carnival celebrations for Alleyne are not quite over yet.
“We talk so much about how London has lost its edge or how it doesn’t have any subcultures anymore,” he says. “In some instances that might be true, but what it does have is culture. And I am going to champion that.”
Jawara Alleyne presents his SS26 collection, Tabanca, at 8pm on September 21
