Sure, the same could be said for many cities around the world, but London really is a city with music at its core. There are few places that emblematize the British capital’s status as a font of world-shaping sounds quite like Abbey Road studio in St John’s Wood, which even those who aren’t familiar with the city will know as that street with the zebra crossing The Beatles were snapped walking across.
Adding to Abbey Road’s lore tonight was Labrum, which took to the studio to present a collection entitled “Designed by Immigrants: Sound of Us,” a material meditation on London’s rich tapestry of sounds and the migration flows essential in bringing them about. From the outset it was clear this wouldn’t be an orthodox show experience; after all, Labrum has staged some of London’s most ambitious spectacles—last season, the city’s style set schlepped out to the home of Arsenal Football Club for a show on the pitch.
Walking into the space today—a raised, T-shaped stage topped a band set up at its fore—the room was animated by boppy, brass-led ska and psych-rock, and later, to the whoops of everyone over the age of about 27, appearances by some of the defining figures in British grime, including Akala and Ghetts. “I was feeling quite nostalgic this season, so I wanted to reflect on the era that made me fall in love with music in the UK,” said Labrum founder Foday Dumbuya, recalling London’s post-garage, early grime heyday of the early-to-mid 00s. “It was a time when London started to embrace this new sound that spoke to who we are, and stopped looking to the States. And it’s important to look at who was pioneering that movement. They’re the products of migration—their parents came from somewhere else.”
While perhaps not a direct foil to the bars that flowed, the clothes that filed along the cropped, raised runway embodied a similar ethos, hybridizing ostensibly inflexible British sartorial codes with West African color and honed craftsmanship. “We’ve gone back to the silhouettes that we’ve been working with since the beginning,” Dumbuya said, nodding to the crisp double-breasted suiting in striped black jacquard and denim shirts with bleached-out sun motifs. “It’s really about mixing this very British culture of tailoring with a West African flair.” The sensibility was there in ample suiting cut in an ivory-and-gray fil coupé denim featuring cowrie shell motifs, a longstanding emblem of Labrum. Things don’t feel all that stable in the UK right now, to say the least. This show was a welcome reminder that the foundations of what could make these drizzly isles great again extend far beyond them.
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