April 10, 2026 |
Has the London look ever been this slick? From Saul Nash’s sportswear-tailoring crossovers and Oscar Ouyang’s knitwear wonders to the West African influences of Labrum and the cult wardrobe of Stefan Cooke, these brands are making the sort of menswear worth getting excited about.
STEFAN COOKE
Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt have been thinking a lot about shopping. The duo, who are partners in work and life, grew up in a golden age of the British high street. “When we were teenagers, we’d both be in Topman every day,” says Burt. A trip into town – Cooke is from West Sussex, Burt from Somerset – to poke around the shops was an event in itself. At a surface level, trawling through the sales rails was a cheap and cheerful way to hang with friends. In a broader sense, physical retail spaces were breeding grounds for subcultures to flourish.
But instead of mourning the glory days, the duo has taken matters into their own hands. Enter Jake’s, the Saturday shop run by Burt in Bethnal Green, East London, that has quickly become a hangout for the city’s most fashionable folk. Each week, Burt whips up divine one-offs and limited-edition togs (mostly crafted from upcycled garments), which he sells at the weekend. Stock doesn’t last long on the shelves, all while shoppers enjoy a cup of tea and a natter with the designer.
from left: from left: Yacine, Maxime and Emilio wear STEFAN COOKE and Yacine wears STEFAN COOKE
“It was quite incidental,” says Burt of Jake’s origins at the tail end of 2024. “Our friend’s dad basically had a free building that he was going to renovate. He just gave us the keys to it for eight months. We had that massive space downstairs, so I came to the conclusion that I would do Jake’s in there.”
Though it started as what Burt calls a “kind of a vanity project, just for fun,” Jake’s has morphed into a cult shopping experience that has toured the globe, with pop-ups in New York, Osaka and Tokyo, and more to follow. He was inspired by the make-do attitude of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s Bethnal Green venture The Shop, which was around for the first six months of 1993, and Japan’s approach to retail, such as Comme des Garçons’ guerrilla stores from the early 2000s, which he describes as “its own cult, its own artform”.
This shopping inspiration has fed into the superb SS26 Stefan Cooke collection, too. A mix of pleated woollen tuxedo trousers, zip-up drainpipe trousers and military flight jackets in custard yellow, the pair were initially inspired by Amy Arbus’s street style photos of 1980s New York for The Village Voice. “Everyone is styled in several different things, like there’s this great picture of Madonna in an old coat and like a pair of leggings. We wanted this collection to feel eclectic,” says Cooke.
Maxime wears STEFAN COOKE
When crafting the collection, they’d been studying New Wave Montreal-based brand Parachute, whose store through the ’80s was a meeting point for its loyalists who would congregate on the shop floor dressed head-to-toe in its wares. “It created a mise-en-scéne that attracted new customers who would come and feel fascinated and then buy clothes with a way to access that culture,” says Burt. The pair have skipped the catwalk in recent seasons in favour of intimate get-togethers where their own fanbase can come and experience the collections up close and put in pre-orders for their fave pieces.
“We’re a business that exists in a very strange time, I feel you need to adapt,” says Cooke. “The number one thing is that we keep the core of it healthy, so everything else can work around it. When you do an intimate event, however we’re doing it, people want to be involved, as they are supportive and care about [what we do]. That’s really nice.”
Taken from 10 Men Issue 63 – CLASSIC, CRAFT, NOSTALGIA – out NOW. Order your copy here.
THE FAB FOUR
Photographer LEONARDO VELOCE
Fashion Editor KAREN BINNS
Text PAUL TONER
Models YACINE FERROUDJ at Garçons by Gervais, EMILIO DE DUVE and MAXIME EL HANAFI at Select Model Management
Hair SEBASTIEN BASCLE using Hair Rituel by SISLEY
Make-up EMMA MILES at Caren using WELEDA
Photographer’s assistant BRANDO GRAMAZIO
Fashion assistant SORAYA RIZZUTO
Casting CONAN LAURENDOT
Production SONYA MAZURYK
