Yaku: The Impossible Family Reunion in RPG Space, Chapter 6

All London Fashion Week is, for me now, is a reason to see what Yaku will do next. I cut my schedule this season, choosing only a handful of shows. Sometimes life insists you can’t be everywhere. But Yaku isn’t a show you fit into life. Yaku is the disruption, the gravitational pull. Rain, illness, family obligations – none of them would have kept me from The Impossible Family Reunion in RPG Space. And yet, with my expectations already impossibly high, he and his team still managed to exceed them.

This sixth chapter, A Ground to Stand On, marked Yaku Stapleton’s first foray into a catwalk format. I’ll admit: I doubted. How could the sprawling world-building of his previous presentations survive the linear logic of a runway? But as Jordan Fox’s score opened, the first models emerged and the air shifted. My friend nudged me to show me goosebumps rising on her arm. I realised immediately how wrong I’d been. Yaku had not diluted his vision – he had elevated it.

The collection carried the family’s saga into new terrain. Lorrelle, Ricky, and Mum became archetypes of guardianship, pragmatism, and shapeshifting adaptability. Each figure appeared in three states – base, warrior, elemental – tracing identity from the everyday to the mythic. Their silhouettes were sculptural, exaggerated, at times indistinguishable from the landscapes they evoked: camouflage bleeding into earth tones, armour-like textures giving way to organic drape. The clothes seemed less worn on the body than grown out of it, protective and declarative in equal measure.

Here, the family encountered the Télavani, beings informed by the pre-colonial resistance histories of Jamaica and St. Vincent. They emerged as both ancestors and avatars, their resilience embedded in swollen proportions and grounded movements. Yaku’s silhouettes drew from this lineage, towering, rooted, yet fluid. The effect was mythic, but never ornamental. It was fashion that carried history, resistance written into form.

Dermot Daly’s performance direction brought this to life with remarkable clarity. The cast inhabited quests, their movements rhythmic, ritualistic, they were gestures of guardianship, encounters with danger, transformations unfolding mid-stride. In this choreography, Yaku’s family was no longer frozen in tableau; they were moving, evolving, and actively engaging with the world.

The soundtrack gave the procession its pulse, Fox’s compositions layering the urgency of grime with the reverence of medieval hymns, a soundtrack for battles fought both within and without. The garments, too, held this duality: tweeds unravelled into camouflage, organic dyeing became elemental surfaces, and vinyl sheens pressed against soft, grounded textiles. Yaku has always treated fabric as narrative, and here it became a portal, each piece a page in the ongoing epic.

What lingers most, though, is the way the show balanced myth and intimacy. For all its world-building, A Ground to Stand On was about inheritance, about what we carry forward and how we survive. The Télavani, born from resistance, affirmed that history is not a weight but a foundation. The future, Yaku suggests, is not unmoored invention; it is the rewriting of what could have been, grounded in what was.

As the final looks passed and the music swelled, I realised I was witnessing the expansion of a universe that has already profoundly changed London Fashion Week. It wasn’t just the best show of the season, it was one of the finest I have ever seen. And if there is one lesson to take from Yaku’s growing epic, it is this: never doubt him.

Read the article here: https://thecoldmagazine.co.uk/yaku-the-impossible-family-reunion-in-rpg-space-chapter-6/