On Saturday afternoon, outside the glass doors of a white cube gallery in Bethnal Green, a lively crowd—the majority boldly dressed, and a few rather scantily clad for a chilly February day—was spilling across the pavement. Weaving your way through them and into the space, brightly colored clothes were strewn across plinths and stretched across chairs, pinned to the walls or seemingly discarded on the floor. In one room, a disembodied pair of legs was spread akimbo in the corner in lurid golden trousers, and haphazardly stuffed in a manner that recalled a Sarah Lucas sculpture. In another, a layered look of a padded jacket, woven top, and lacy padded skirt had been carefully laid out like a taxonomical museum display, or perhaps a crime scene.
In lieu of his highly energetic runway shows, this playful presentation was how Jawara Alleyne chose to show his latest collection—a somewhat unexpected setting, given its title of “Nightlife.” But Alleyne explained that he was thinking about nightlife “from a sociological point of view,” less as a body of work specifically about the club itself, and more about nightlife as an imagined space where we discover and express our sense of self. “It’s where we find ourselves, it’s where we find our community, it’s where we dress up and experiment with fashion,” he said, also pointing to the alarmingly frequent announcements of legendary nightlife venues shuttering their doors in London recently. “Without those places, I question how the new kids would be able to find that sense of self.”
To wit, the way Alleyne is presenting the collection to those who weren’t able to pop over to Bethnal Green is via a lookbook that largely features his friends, many of whom he’d first met on the dance floor. “I think it made the garments feel a lot more real,” he said of the musicians and stylists and writers who made up the mix. The dynamism of the photographs meant that he was still able to translate the thrilling movement and vitality of his garments on the runway: acid neon lace dresses and bubble skirts, crinkled plaid cargo trousers, trippy checked hooded jackets, polo shirts and tees slashed and sutured back together with safety pins or knots.
Seeing the images and the exhibition in tandem only showcased Alleyne’s impressive versatility: if the pop stars one day stop calling for custom garments (though, given Rihanna famously described him as her favorite designer, that seems unlikey), he’d certainly cause a splash by venturing into the art world proper. Still, it’s his love for clothes and his fascination with their meaning that keeps him ticking over. Of the exhibition, he said, “It was about presenting the garments not as product, but as function,” noting that the way the clothes were shredded and strewn was in part about where they end up at the end of a wild night out. Alleyne talks—and thinks—like a true fashion auteur.