“I think I’m naturally a philosopher in the way I approach things,” says the designer Jawara Alleyne, who was surrounded by books of all kinds long before clothing came to occupy his life. Much of the fashion designer’s childhood was spent in a bookshop in Grand Cayman, where he worked every Saturday for six years – his first ever job – stacking and organising newspapers, comics, novels and poetry books that introduced him to the possibilities of the written word.
It was there that he first encountered fashion imagery, having first pick of the island’s imported magazines. “The teen-y ones were my favourites,” he says, reeling off a list of erstwhile and existent youth publications from Popteen and Teen Vogue to Tiger Beat. No issue featuring Rihanna was safe: unlimited access to pull out posters of the Barbadian pop icon – who now describes Jawara as her favourite designer – resulted in a full-blown mural on his bedroom wall.
When Alleyne left the island to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins in London, he approached his studies with an intellectual curiosity. He founded his eponymous label soon after he graduated, cultivating a design language that the industry has quickly come to know: conceptual, focused on deconstruction and materiality, rooted in identity and sceptical of gender and its binary confines.
Alleyne imagines the trajectory of his career like a series of novels, each collection propelling the narrative forward, developing the story and returning to familiar refrains with added maturity and knowledge. “We’ve done one novel now, we’re about to start the next book. Which is more about how you build a commercial foundation within a world that is built on fantasy, stories and identity. It feels more like a sensation, a sentiment, rather than a product,” he explains.
Now in the studio, preparing for the release of a Notting Hill Carnival-themed capsule collection, Alleyne tells AnOther about five books that have shaped his practice.
What is Culture For?, The School of Life
“It’s a really small publication that I discovered when I was doing my BA, when a lot of my work was thinking about this question: what is culture for? Why are we making fashion? Why are we creating art? What is any of this really for? The book’s answer is quite straightforward, but I found it to be very affirming. It helped define the way that I think about my brand and practice. Outside of presenting, fashion is a business in which you sell products to make money. But fashion also exists within the context of culture, separate to that commercial sphere. This book grounds me whenever I’m thinking about what I want to use the brand for and the ways that the brand can show up for culture. It can’t just be something where the only MO is to sell the product. I want to make things that mean something, that can support communities, tell their stories and shed light on people whose experiences might otherwise go untold.”
Maison Martin Margiela, Rizzoli
“I didn’t realise how similar I was to Margiela until I moved to London. When I was in the Cayman Islands, I always did fashion. I did my first show when I was 16. But I was doing it thinking about people like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld. Because when I was a kid, those were the people whose clothes were on the front cover of the magazines that were coming in. Then I moved to London and I started to realise how similar I was in the way that I was doing things to Margiela.
“Margiela thought about beauty in a different way. Fashion is typically about dressing up, whereas I feel Margiela was about dressing down. I think the philosophy of fashion that existed pre-Margiela was about a woman needing to fit a certain image, an aesthetic way of thinking about femininity. Not many people were challenging femininity and what it means to be a woman. People like Margiela and Rei Kawakubo arrived on the runway with a different understanding of what it could mean to be a woman. I only recently acquired this book, but I feel Margiela is a really pivotal designer for me.”
Yes Rasta, Patrick Cariou
“It’s a photo book that was shot in Jamaica by Patrick Cariou, who went into the mountains and photographed the Rastafarian community. My father was Rastafarian, I grew up in the same community that he grew up in and I was always reminded of this part of my identity. Coming to London, I was trying to find Caribbean stories, Black stories, African stories. When I was in university, it was extremely difficult to find anything from a fashion research point of view that wasn’t a very Eurocentric presentation of fashion. I was always seeking out these books, and this was one that I found and hold dear. It’s in black and white. It’s very rare that you get to see these rural communities being documented in a way that’s timeless and beautiful, and not presented through the lens of somebody that you need to feel sorry for but rather just presenting them as they were. It’s one of the references I often come back to.”
Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography, ed. Alona Pardo
“The Barbican did an exhibition pre-Covid-19 about masculinities, which they then turned into a book. A friend of mine got it for me because a lot of my research was about identity and gender and masculinity, and different ways of thinking about what it means to be a man, what does it mean to design menswear? How does menswear and men’s fashion appear over the years, whether you’re a woman or a man? It’s a book that I think has defined or reinforced my research.”
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
“It’s the book that made me love reading. The series was coming out at a time when I was at the same age as the characters, and there was something so exciting about being able to disappear into that magical world. I was reading this while I was at the bookstore. I would literally be the first one to get the books because I was there, working. Before that I liked reading, but I hadn’t found anything that I loved like this. It showed me how immersive reading could be. I still hold onto that feeling. I remember waking up in the morning to go to school and imagining I was in the book, on my way to Hogwarts. It really trained my imagination.”
