Stefan Cooke shaped the Spring Summer 2026 season around the idea that clothing grows meaning through retail, archives, and community. The collection, titled Illusion Ascends, looked at the decline of the high street, remembered the role of shops as incubators of subcultures, and considered how new languages emerge inside independent spaces.
The designers connected their own experience to this vision. Since opening a store in November of the previous year, they had seen how a retail space creates community and identity. For them, a shop acts as a cultural environment, specific to its site, rare in its form, and inclusive in its gathering.
History provided further examples. Canadian brand Parachute, founded by Nicola Pelly and Harry Parnass, became known for shops that supported the New Wave scene in Montreal before expanding into New York and Los Angeles. Those spaces acted as sets, where clothing, hair, and make-up turned customers into participants in a cultural performance.
Amy Arbus’ portraits for the Village Voice in the 1980s offered another model. Her photographs documented Downtown New York as a place where people styled themselves into characters through eclectic layers of clothing. Each figure existed as a collage of references. Cooke looked to that archive as proof of how visual culture grows from communities and streets.
The design process for Illusion Ascends followed this logic. The team combined pieces from their archive with discoveries from research trips, constructing ensembles as collages that produced characters. For presentation, they photographed the collection on people connected to their own shop, turning retail into both stage and subject.
Menswear introduced the collection through cream wool tuxedo trousers cut with vertical and horizontal pleats, dropped low at the crotch and cropped at the ankle. A surplus flight jacket in treated British cotton added density, covered with zips finished in lilac, moss, butter, blood orange, and sand. A baseball cap embroidered with Illusion Ascends fixed the season’s title in direct language.
Womenswear included an oversized dress with a linebacker jersey in hammer silk dyed in team colours for its upper half, its shoulders extended to exaggerated scale. The lower section shifted into a pleated skirt supplied by English academy haberdashers. A wide leather belt marked with the infinity motif fastened the waist, and burgundy platform wedge boots carried the same emblem at the ankle.
The title itself carried dual meaning. Illusion described the collage quality of the styling, where references layered into new characters. Ascends suggested the cultural rise of independent retail, positioning small shops as the places where future subcultures will form and grow.
