Rewrite and translate this title Yaku Stapleton, the designer bringing dinocore to the LFW runway Womenswear to Japanese between 50 and 60 characters. Do not include any introductory or extra text; return only the title in Japanese.

Walking into Yaku Stapleton’s London Fashion Week presentation space was like entering into an alternate universe. In one section, models in dino-printed trousers and Stegosaurus shoes hung out in a makeshift living room, its walls lined with cave drawings and ancient looking scrolls. Elsewhere, models trained in combat inside a sort of prehistoric gym, lifting stone dumbbells and fighting with ornate swords that were constructed from bouncy fabric. Taking place at London’s 180 Studios, this was Stapleton SS25 collection, The Possible Family Reunion in RPG Space, the designer’s first outing on the London Fashion Week schedule.

But though this may have been Stapelton’s “official” debut, it’s by no means the first we’ve heard from him. The young designer’s self-described ‘couture costume design’ landed on our radar back when he was a student at Central Saint Martins, having relocated from his St Albans hometown to London’s premier fashion school. Making arresting clothes that combined Afrofuturism with role-playing video games, it was the designer’s graduate collection that truly captured the fashion community’s attention, an offering of gorp-coded, inflated functional wear that also introduced a preoccupation with all things dinosaur. The capsule won Stapleton the coveted L’Oréal Creative Award for 2023 – judged by a panel of industry experts including Dazed’s editor-in-chief Ib Kamara – and this was then followed by the launch of eponymous brand YAKU, which operates from London where Stapelton now resides.

Fast forward to London Fashion Week SS25, and the 26-year-old designer has transformed that conceptual fantasy into a tangible reality. In the ancient-coded world that appeared in the basement of 180, a total of four different stage sets stood before us, occupied by “limitless versions” of his own family members, as Stapleton described them. In the designer’s new world, his family were preparing for a treacherous journey ahead, and each set denoted a stage of that preparation. There was the ‘Learning’ section, where the scrolls and drawings were, the ‘Combat’ section, where models fought with the fabric swords, the ‘Gathering’ section, where food is foraged for the journey, and finally the ‘Meditation’ section, purely for internal self-reflection. It’s a testament to the designer’s expansive vision that a fashion week debut was the setting for such an ambitious project.

Though Stapleton’s design world is clearly hyper-conceptual, at the heart of that worldbuilding is a creative practice that produces unique but wearable clothes – as the designer says himself, “at the end of the day, these are clothes that need to be worn. And it’s clear that the designer doesn’t just have his head stuck in the fantasy world of design, but is cognisant of the real life realities of fashion, having hosted free upcycling workshops that not only exchange vital skills but also opens a point-of-entry to the brand for people who may not be able to purchase the pieces instantly.

Below, we catch up with Stapleton about the inspirations behind his dino-coded garments, the online multiplayer games that inspire him, and his progression as a designer since graduating from Saint Martins.

Hey Yaku – congratulations on your SS25 collection. What was it like building those huge sets?

Yaku Stapleton: We are a team of fashion designers – no one in the team is a set designer. Everyone’s having to switch and recalibrate a bit, meaning that it is far harder, and hard to grasp the progress.

Was it a big team?

Yaku Stapleton: Nas who co-directs with me, is also my partner. She handles more of the traditionally non creative tasks. I think all of [the tasks] need a lot of problem solving. I will say our team are all designers. I refer to them as designers, I try to have them also speak about themselves as designers. Sometimes it’s tempting as a student or an intern to say ‘I’m an intern’, but what we try and do as a team now is say ‘you are a designer, so you’re going to be treated as such.’

Have you seen the TV show The Bear?

Yaku Stapleton: I’m halfway through the newest season.

That reminds me of when [head chef] Carmy calls everyone else chef in the kitchen. Everyone’s on the same level.

Yaku Stapleton: Exactly. I have worked in kitchens – the language of kitchens is not that far off from fashion!

So this your first time on the official London Fashion Week schedule? 

Yaku Stapleton: Yeah. Since graduation, we’ve been doing sales and making collections, [but] we haven’t done anything public that is purely based around a collection. This is the first time since my graduation, which was only like a year and a bit ago.

At your graduation you won the 2023 L’Oréal Professionnel Award. Do you feel any pressure from that?

Yaku Stapleton: There definitely is pressure. I don’t know if it is in correlation with the L’Oreal award, I think the pressure just comes from wanting to do a good job and not wasting things. It’s great to get the award. Previous things I’ve been awarded like scholarships and grants – where people have looked at a bunch of artists and said, ‘OK, we trust this one’ – that makes me think I definitely am good. Now as a team, I think we are sick. I don’t want to waste the opportunity, I do not want to waste that trust. And I don’t want any of the people that give the grants to be looking and thinking ‘is this person going to waste it or not?’

So can you tell me about the concept of this show? I like the phrase where you describe each look as ‘limitless versions of family members’. Tell me a bit about that.

Yaku Stapleton: I’ll try to think about them in real life and think about what they do day to day – how people interact with them, how they interact with people. Then I will create a collage based on that real life person to try and max out their characteristics through this kind of 2D, sometimes humanoid, sometimes monster character. That I call the limitless version.

I don’t want to commodify Blackness and people see it as just hope. They need to understand that there is pain that comes with that – Yaku Stapleton

And then at your LFW presentation there were these four different sets that your family members were inhabiting? What’s the story behind that?

Yaku Stapleton: So the story itself: Elliot, who’s my brother, went out to encounter the physical embodiment of his past, to make peace with it. He has now come back to the family – I guess he was like a torchbearer – and said, ‘OK, this is what is ahead as a family. We must now all prepare for this journey that we are about to go on.’

The four sets are the four stages of preparation for this journey. There is ‘Meditation & Self-Reflection, then there is ‘Combat’ – so more of the typical fighting montage prep. Then there is the ‘Gathering’ section, which is the gathering side of hunting and gathering – necklace making, cooking, hanging fish. The last one is a ‘Learning’ area which is more scholarly. I am looking at that one as the people who note down important parts of history and plot out where we are going, so that everything is detailed and in order.

You also incorporate your Black identity into your work as well.

Yaku Stapleton: Fashion is really tricky – as is anything – being Black, because I am able to provide my own perspective, but then not many of us get to cut through and speak to more people. In your head you also feel responsible to do a good job and not just commodify your Blackness. You would hope that at least there is the opportunity for people to understand that.

We can express ourselves, it’s something we’re good at, but there’s also pain that comes with that, and I don’t want to commodify Blackness and people see it as just hope. They need to understand that there is pain that comes with that.

So it’s not a flattened experience.

Yaku Stapleton: It is tricky though. I think trying to work that out as a person, but also design at the same time, and to then channel that into clothing, will take much more time. How do you make pain clothes? I don’t know. But then, also, I have got to work out how to communicate that with a team who do not have the same experiences as me, but could share the same feelings. It’s about working out how to communicate that accurately, because you can’t say ‘everyone, we are all going to channel our pain.’ That’s not responsible. You have to explain to them where my mind is at. If any of this comes naturally to you then we can put that in, but ultimately, it takes time.

Do you think you could ever make clothes without a deep story?

Yaku Stapleton: I think so. At the end of the day, especially with fashion design, I could ramble on concepts forever. But there is also a duty to make clothes that work, [that are] comfortable, new and combine different references together in this visual, wearable collage. At the end of the day, these are clothes that need to be worn. They are going to get taken out of the context of the show, or even the look. It’s rare that people are going to buy a full look. So then it needs to be able to exist outside of the context of the complete look. That is really important to me.

In terms of the reference, there’s obviously a lot of monster and dinosaur stuff. Where does that come from for you?

Yaku Stapleton: I think online multiplayer games. I was looking into Runescape, and since the last season we have been looking into other games and interests I have had. So Yu-Gi-Oh has been really important. It’s a lot of imagination based stuff, which is so nice for me because, by default, with dinosaurs, you have to imagine. I was really interested in Tomoyuki Tanaka who made Godzilla.

Does this all come from your teenage years?

Yaku Stapleton: Yeah. Also from that era the anime we were watching. There’s been a lot of Berserk references – rewatching that has been really important. I also loved dinosaurs when I was younger. Putting them in these new contexts is maybe like a desire to learn more, because there’s only so much we know about them.

How do you think your work has progressed since you started designing?

Yaku Stapleton: I think it is the best work that YAKU the brand has done. The team is the best that it has been. The direct result of that is that the clothes are wicked. Even old pieces that we have redone have improved so much from their first iterations that it means that it is a collection of clothes where every garment is super serious. That even goes down to dye technique – we are just better at dying, more accurate with dying. Before, I was writing on my phone notes ‘green and a bit of blue.’ Now it is gram specific dyes. We have a literal library that we can refer to and choose our colours that way.

I’ve also been able to live in some of these pieces and the fabrics for longer, so have been able to put that feedback into the garments. I think this project – the project with just the clothes, but if you add this presentation on top – I think it is crazy. It’s very ambitious. I think it’s the most impressive for me so far. Definitely ambitious.

Walking into Yaku Stapleton’s London Fashion Week presentation space was like entering into an alternate universe. In one section, models in dino-printed trousers and Stegosaurus shoes hung out in a makeshift living room, its walls lined with cave drawings and ancient looking scrolls. Elsewhere, models trained in combat inside a sort of prehistoric gym, lifting stone dumbbells and fighting with ornate swords that were constructed from bouncy fabric. Taking place at London’s 180 Studios, this was Stapleton SS25 collection, The Possible Family Reunion in RPG Space, the designer’s first outing on the London Fashion Week schedule.

But though this may have been Stapelton’s “official” debut, it’s by no means the first we’ve heard from him. The young designer’s self-described ‘couture costume design’ landed on our radar back when he was a student at Central Saint Martins, having relocated from his St Albans hometown to London’s premier fashion school. Making arresting clothes that combined Afrofuturism with role-playing video games, it was the designer’s graduate collection that truly captured the fashion community’s attention, an offering of gorp-coded, inflated functional wear that also introduced a preoccupation with all things dinosaur. The capsule won Stapleton the coveted L’Oréal Creative Award for 2023 – judged by a panel of industry experts including Dazed’s editor-in-chief Ib Kamara – and this was then followed by the launch of eponymous brand YAKU, which operates from London where Stapelton now resides.

Fast forward to London Fashion Week SS25, and the 26-year-old designer has transformed that conceptual fantasy into a tangible reality. In the ancient-coded world that appeared in the basement of 180, a total of four different stage sets stood before us, occupied by “limitless versions” of his own family members, as Stapleton described them. In the designer’s new world, his family were preparing for a treacherous journey ahead, and each set denoted a stage of that preparation. There was the ‘Learning’ section, where the scrolls and drawings were, the ‘Combat’ section, where models fought with the fabric swords, the ‘Gathering’ section, where food is foraged for the journey, and finally the ‘Meditation’ section, purely for internal self-reflection. It’s a testament to the designer’s expansive vision that a fashion week debut was the setting for such an ambitious project.

Though Stapleton’s design world is clearly hyper-conceptual, at the heart of that worldbuilding is a creative practice that produces unique but wearable clothes – as the designer says himself, “at the end of the day, these are clothes that need to be worn. And it’s clear that the designer doesn’t just have his head stuck in the fantasy world of design, but is cognisant of the real life realities of fashion, having hosted free upcycling workshops that not only exchange vital skills but also opens a point-of-entry to the brand for people who may not be able to purchase the pieces instantly.

Below, we catch up with Stapleton about the inspirations behind his dino-coded garments, the online multiplayer games that inspire him, and his progression as a designer since graduating from Saint Martins.

Hey Yaku – congratulations on your SS25 collection. What was it like building those huge sets?

Yaku Stapleton: We are a team of fashion designers – no one in the team is a set designer. Everyone’s having to switch and recalibrate a bit, meaning that it is far harder, and hard to grasp the progress.

Was it a big team?

Yaku Stapleton: Nas who co-directs with me, is also my partner. She handles more of the traditionally non creative tasks. I think all of [the tasks] need a lot of problem solving. I will say our team are all designers. I refer to them as designers, I try to have them also speak about themselves as designers. Sometimes it’s tempting as a student or an intern to say ‘I’m an intern’, but what we try and do as a team now is say ‘you are a designer, so you’re going to be treated as such.’

Have you seen the TV show The Bear?

Yaku Stapleton: I’m halfway through the newest season.

That reminds me of when [head chef] Carmy calls everyone else chef in the kitchen. Everyone’s on the same level.

Yaku Stapleton: Exactly. I have worked in kitchens – the language of kitchens is not that far off from fashion!

So this your first time on the official London Fashion Week schedule? 

Yaku Stapleton: Yeah. Since graduation, we’ve been doing sales and making collections, [but] we haven’t done anything public that is purely based around a collection. This is the first time since my graduation, which was only like a year and a bit ago.

At your graduation you won the 2023 L’Oréal Professionnel Award. Do you feel any pressure from that?

Yaku Stapleton: There definitely is pressure. I don’t know if it is in correlation with the L’Oreal award, I think the pressure just comes from wanting to do a good job and not wasting things. It’s great to get the award. Previous things I’ve been awarded like scholarships and grants – where people have looked at a bunch of artists and said, ‘OK, we trust this one’ – that makes me think I definitely am good. Now as a team, I think we are sick. I don’t want to waste the opportunity, I do not want to waste that trust. And I don’t want any of the people that give the grants to be looking and thinking ‘is this person going to waste it or not?’

So can you tell me about the concept of this show? I like the phrase where you describe each look as ‘limitless versions of family members’. Tell me a bit about that.

Yaku Stapleton: I’ll try to think about them in real life and think about what they do day to day – how people interact with them, how they interact with people. Then I will create a collage based on that real life person to try and max out their characteristics through this kind of 2D, sometimes humanoid, sometimes monster character. That I call the limitless version.

I don’t want to commodify Blackness and people see it as just hope. They need to understand that there is pain that comes with that – Yaku Stapleton

And then at your LFW presentation there were these four different sets that your family members were inhabiting? What’s the story behind that?

Yaku Stapleton: So the story itself: Elliot, who’s my brother, went out to encounter the physical embodiment of his past, to make peace with it. He has now come back to the family – I guess he was like a torchbearer – and said, ‘OK, this is what is ahead as a family. We must now all prepare for this journey that we are about to go on.’

The four sets are the four stages of preparation for this journey. There is ‘Meditation & Self-Reflection, then there is ‘Combat’ – so more of the typical fighting montage prep. Then there is the ‘Gathering’ section, which is the gathering side of hunting and gathering – necklace making, cooking, hanging fish. The last one is a ‘Learning’ area which is more scholarly. I am looking at that one as the people who note down important parts of history and plot out where we are going, so that everything is detailed and in order.

You also incorporate your Black identity into your work as well.

Yaku Stapleton: Fashion is really tricky – as is anything – being Black, because I am able to provide my own perspective, but then not many of us get to cut through and speak to more people. In your head you also feel responsible to do a good job and not just commodify your Blackness. You would hope that at least there is the opportunity for people to understand that.

We can express ourselves, it’s something we’re good at, but there’s also pain that comes with that, and I don’t want to commodify Blackness and people see it as just hope. They need to understand that there is pain that comes with that.

So it’s not a flattened experience.

Yaku Stapleton: It is tricky though. I think trying to work that out as a person, but also design at the same time, and to then channel that into clothing, will take much more time. How do you make pain clothes? I don’t know. But then, also, I have got to work out how to communicate that with a team who do not have the same experiences as me, but could share the same feelings. It’s about working out how to communicate that accurately, because you can’t say ‘everyone, we are all going to channel our pain.’ That’s not responsible. You have to explain to them where my mind is at. If any of this comes naturally to you then we can put that in, but ultimately, it takes time.

Do you think you could ever make clothes without a deep story?

Yaku Stapleton: I think so. At the end of the day, especially with fashion design, I could ramble on concepts forever. But there is also a duty to make clothes that work, [that are] comfortable, new and combine different references together in this visual, wearable collage. At the end of the day, these are clothes that need to be worn. They are going to get taken out of the context of the show, or even the look. It’s rare that people are going to buy a full look. So then it needs to be able to exist outside of the context of the complete look. That is really important to me.

In terms of the reference, there’s obviously a lot of monster and dinosaur stuff. Where does that come from for you?

Yaku Stapleton: I think online multiplayer games. I was looking into Runescape, and since the last season we have been looking into other games and interests I have had. So Yu-Gi-Oh has been really important. It’s a lot of imagination based stuff, which is so nice for me because, by default, with dinosaurs, you have to imagine. I was really interested in Tomoyuki Tanaka who made Godzilla.

Does this all come from your teenage years?

Yaku Stapleton: Yeah. Also from that era the anime we were watching. There’s been a lot of Berserk references – rewatching that has been really important. I also loved dinosaurs when I was younger. Putting them in these new contexts is maybe like a desire to learn more, because there’s only so much we know about them.

How do you think your work has progressed since you started designing?

Yaku Stapleton: I think it is the best work that YAKU the brand has done. The team is the best that it has been. The direct result of that is that the clothes are wicked. Even old pieces that we have redone have improved so much from their first iterations that it means that it is a collection of clothes where every garment is super serious. That even goes down to dye technique – we are just better at dying, more accurate with dying. Before, I was writing on my phone notes ‘green and a bit of blue.’ Now it is gram specific dyes. We have a literal library that we can refer to and choose our colours that way.

I’ve also been able to live in some of these pieces and the fabrics for longer, so have been able to put that feedback into the garments. I think this project – the project with just the clothes, but if you add this presentation on top – I think it is crazy. It’s very ambitious. I think it’s the most impressive for me so far. Definitely ambitious.