Last season, Foday Dumbuya presented the first in a trilogy of collections exploring osmosis. Not the biological process itself; rather, the designer took it as a prism through which to consider migration histories and their culture-shaping consequences. There was also a focus on how sound acts as a cultural vessel—an aural transcript of movements and cross-pollinations across borders. This season, the lens was on textiles and how they function in a similar documentary capacity, as palimpsests of human movement and exchange.
That made itself evident on arrival at the show venue, a cavernous hall in Westminster, located between the seats of the British government and monarchy, where guests were greeted by two weavers at handlooms, slowly producing a bolt of striped cloth not unlike a Yoruba aso oke. Now, dwelling on Britain’s historical role in the relationship between textile production and human migration can lead you to some pretty sombre places. With this show, however, Dumbuya’s intentions felt a little less damning; there was even a thread of optimism darting through the proposal. “We were looking at how, over time, textiles have migrated across continents, and what those textiles become in those new contexts,” he said in a preview. “If you think of indigo dyeing, for example, how it’s done in Nigeria is a completely different thing to what it looks like when it’s done here. But the textile still carries a memory.”
The result was what my benchmates and I unanimously agreed was Labrum’s most refined body of work to date. As ever, craft detailing was a key conduit for the designer’s messaging, but the resulting aesthetic felt less outré—and all the more confident and convincing for it. The opening looks—slim, long-lined coats with funnel collars; roomy shirts in visibly hefty poplins; mandarin-collared jackets with military pockets—came in a sober palette of taupe, navy and fawn. A particular standout was a cream duffel cloth overcoat with stark black appliqué panels and a trio of toggle fastenings. Elsewhere, similar pieces came with pen-drawn embroidery created in collaboration with Indian artisans. “We’ve reinterpreted some of our artworks to showcase their craftsmanship—how they mix embroidery with woven fabrics—and how you mix the language of classic English tailoring with a textile from another part of the world,” said Dumbuya. Elsewhere, the brand’s signature passport graphic was reimagined in scintillating jacquards and indigo denim; camouflage textures were, on closer inspection, rendered in blistered khaki moiré; fuzzed suiting came in jet black fil coupé with cowrie shell motifs, the shells themselves figuring in a glistening crochet grid worn as a headpiece.
While the collection’s message was reiteration of Labrum’s core narrative, the cloth from which it was crafted more than supported its weight—and its importance, especially in the current climate: after all, “when you think about cloth, it’s something that becomes stronger when it’s tightly woven,” said Dumbaya. “And that’s the message that we want to put out there about culture.”