YAKU SS26
This is the show I look forward to most at London Fashion Week. YAKU has historically been immersive, visually stimulating, and thought-provoking, a world you don’t just watch, but enter. This season, Yaku Stapleton invites us once again into that alternate dimension, where imagination and ancestry collide. The I̶m̶Possible Family Reunion in RPG Space – Chapter 6: A Ground to Stand On.
From the opening moment, it felt as though the tribe had conquered new lands, discovering unseen terrains and building communities out of shared curiosity and resilience. Much like navigating today’s fashion landscape, YAKU asks us to explore the boundaries between fantasy and fashion, to question what’s possible when creation itself becomes an act of remembrance.
Rooted in Stapleton’s evolving mythology, this chapter reinterprets his family as archetypes in a boundless RPG universe. Each garment continues the story, part memory, part prophecy. Lorrelle, the guardian, becomes an emblem of protection and legacy. Ricky, the pragmatic builder, carves pathways forward through chaos. And “Mum,” the shapeshifter, embodies adaptability, holding multiple truths within a single silhouette. Through these three figures, identity becomes kinetic, never static, always transforming across dimensions.
In this imagined world, the family encounters the Télavani: abstract figures informed by pre colonial resistance histories of Jamaica and St. Vincent. Their presence within the narrative expands the concept of lineage, a fusion of myth and preserved memory, land and body intertwined. The garments pay tribute to this symbiosis through sculpted volumes, elemental dye work, and organic materials that feel both ancient and futuristic. Camouflage textures resemble shifting earth, metallic finishes reflect survival’s glint. Layered armor like outerwear tells of endurance reborn as beauty.
Performance director Dermot Daly and composer Jordan Fox reincarnate this mythology through motion and sound. The cast moves as if guided by the pulse of collective memory; part ritual, part rebellion while Fox’s score oscillates between UK grime, jazz, and medieval tonality. This fusion mirrors Yaku’s duality; the street and the sacred, the familiar and the fantastical, merged within an ever expanding cosmos.
What resonated most this season wasn’t only the visual mastery but the emotional undercurrent, the acknowledgment of inheritance. “A Ground to Stand On” reminds us that every creative act rests on the endurance of those who came before, and that resistance can itself be a form of creation. Yaku Stapleton’s universe is not escapism, but reclamation. Not fantasy as flight, but as foundation. As we stepped back into the real world, it became clear that this wasn’t merely a fashion presentation. It was a family gathering, a landscape of memory stitched into motion. In YAKU’s world, fantasy becomes a place to return to ourselves.
