Just a week ago, Tolu Coker was announced as a semi-finalist in this year’s LVMH Prize, one of the industry’s most prestigious accolades. It’s a tremendous moment in the career of any young designer, and a source of personal validation and pride. For Coker, though, the accolade stands for more than herself. “I think for me it’s less a conversation of validation and more a conversation of equity,” she said in a preview ahead of her fall presentation. “A big part of my messaging has always been about redefining luxury by rooting it back in heritage. And often that’s the heritage of communities that have traditionally not been documented or were not traditionally considered good enough or valuable enough to exist within that space. Reaching the semifinal feels like an affirmation for an entire community of people, saying that these stories, this heritage, this craftsmanship—it is luxury.”
The collection was titled “Ori”—Yoruba for “head,” denoting “a metaphysical concept regarding birthright and everything which is birthed from one’s aura, self or soul,” Coker explained. It was a concise treatise of the designer’s parameter-shifting vision of luxury. Models were placed about the space, languorously graceful, many holding cotton flower stems, a conscious invocation of the process by which many of the clothes came to life and, of course, cotton’s charged history. The latter connotation was underscored by Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit”—a mournful fugue that allegorizes the horrors of racist lynching across American history, which played in the background—and by the presentation’s predominantly Black casting.
Rather than morose or overly heavy, however, the collection read as a dignified act of reclamation and, ultimately, celebration. Expertly constructed shirt-dresses came with inbuilt corsets and flounced hems, and were executed in crisp white poplins, muted taffetas and duchess satins with graphics that sat somewhere between poppy ’60s prints and the sort you’d seen on ankara cloth. Lapel-less tailored waistcoats came with exaggerated sleeve heads; selvedge denim shirting had princess seam detailing that gracefully skimmed the figure.
These were clothes that sat within the familiar parameters of British heritage design, but which questioned the implicit associations of the idea. “Even when I speak to people today, they automatically assume I design sportswear or streetwear,” Coker said, “but a lot of what I do really leans into British heritage. The thing is, general perceptions of Britishness rarely take migration into context,” although it’s one of the defining features of life in contemporary Britain. “With my work,” she added, “I want to affirm that these stories have value.”
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