Meet Yaku Stapleton, CSM Designer and L’Oréal Fashion Award Winner

Minutes before he was announced as the winner of the L’Oréal Professional Innovation Award at the Central Saint Martins, MA fashion show in late February, designer Yaku Stapleton could be found pacing the venue and “cursing at the wall, trying to calm himself down.” “

For the first time, he experienced the chaos backstage at a runway presentation: pulling models into their looks, running back and forth trying to find the specified models, pinching and tugging at the clothes to make sure everything was just right. One of his models had to go out without a hair display; As soon as they stepped onto the runway, he realized that their keys were in full view.

“For goodness sake!” Speaking to me a month later from his family’s home in St. Albans, England, Stapleton recalls his thoughts at the time. “I don’t usually get stressed, but I was like, ‘Wow, this is really hard.'” When a CSM tutor found the 25-year-old gasping for air after the show, Stapleton thought he might be “explained.” Swearing at the wall. I said, ‘Am I in trouble? Just tell me and I’ll prepare my apology.’

Instead, Stapleton took to the stage, and was given something even more exciting: a trophy for the collection, titled “Impossible Family Reunion in RPG Space,” apparently based on the personalities of several family members. They were characters in a video game. The result was a large collection that caught the eye of Ib Kamara, editor-in-chief of the competition and off-white art and image director of Dazad magazine. Models—including Stapleton’s real-life sister Steph—wore oversized puffer coats in Pepto Bismol pink with extra sleeves. Huge cargo pants with saddle pockets; Soft, slipper-like shoes, knit sweaters and zip-up hoodies. A model hit the catwalk using a fabric mallet that looked like Bowser’s weapon of choice.

Yaku and Steph Stapleton left the stage hand in hand to accept the award.

“That was nuts,” he added. “It was a very surreal moment.”

Family is Stapleton’s central point of reference—not only when it comes to this collection, which he describes as “Afro-Futurism, [the online game] RuneScape operating system and forms found in nature,” he says. “I used the family and the Afro-Futurist movement as a vehicle to explore my own identity and also to create an alternate reality.” What would happen if all the family members lived in this alternate reality, he asked himself? For one, all in one place. They’ll be at the same time—a rare event for Stapleton’s overgrown clan (“There has to be something big like a wedding or a funeral to bring us together,” he adds.

Stapleton, who received a British Fashion Council Foundation MA Scholarship and an LVMH MA Fashion Scholarship, says he doesn’t come from a formal fashion background apart from his Masters at CSM and a BA in Fashion and Costume Design from Leeds Beckett. University. Instead, he started making graphic tees and flyers for parties around age 18. “I made them for my friends; they were one-off things I’d do in Photoshop,” he recalls. “I’d go to this print guy in town and he’d do this metal heat transfer, which was super sticky.” He was a fashion merchandising lecturer at Leeds Beckett when he moved to uni. He gave Stapleton a chance to learn fashion design—if he could get his act together. Stapleton kept his promise to log a 9-to-5 job five days a week, and in return learned critical skills like sketching and “straight-line” sewing.

When covid hit in 2020, the designer Before signing up for an MA at St Martin’s in 2021, he says he holed himself up in his flat “doing things”. “There wasn’t the self-doubt and self-doubt that comes with youth. You can build these organic team systems and networks by always collaborating with people. Stapleton maintained these relationships beyond his graduation; He is currently co-hosting Team Studio with two fellow designers, Ellen Poppy Hill and Maxime Black, who also exhibited at CSMMA. “I just turned around and said, ‘Ellen, how wide should the short fit be?’ I can say,” he says. “I don’t have this deep knowledge of everything, but I think showing that you’re interested and putting real time into what you’re interested in is enough to make something meaningful and worthwhile for yourself. And then hopefully other people will see that too.

As for what’s next, Stapleton is designing a summer 2023 capsule collection (which, he added, may include a return to his screen-printed T-shirt roots. Clothing. “I want to use this capsule as an opportunity to show that I can still make things that are easy to wear and still carry the energy of my design style,” he says. “It’s not going to be like ground level where the price is so high. You can’t really build a community.”

Half-Jamaican, half-Vincentian, Stapleton says transparency is key to crafting his brand this season. “There are a lot of things that are important to me, and I’m not sure what the main message of the label is,” he says. “This may come with a little maturity. But I know that the freedom in which your ideas come from is very important.