Stefan Cooke Goes ‘Away’ In New S/S 24 Campaign

Stefan Cooke and Jake Burt use ‘Away,’ their title for the Stefan Cooke S/S 24 collection, literally in its companion campaign. Photographer Theo Sion and stylist Alice Goddard remove the runway vibe altogether. Gone are details from the summer collection. No more hot sun beating down on hotter legs. Farewell the outdoorsy innocence of sexual sportswear (shirts versus skins if you will). What remains is something pointedly severe that contains the confidence of using high fashion powers for good.

Stefan Cooke has always enjoyed daily, kinda humdrum pleasures gone intensely fashionable. It is their own cult language that often pulls from their pasts. The new campaign recalls a time when the boys were boys. When Kate Moss was obsessed with being her most fashionable YSL self in a Stefano Pilati campaign for Yves Saint Laurent. Styled in almost defiant perfection, while being locked outside of the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris takes high fashion nerve. A thoughtful contrast of being in fashion yet invalidated by that same fashion institution leaves an impression. Stefan Cooke’s new campaign has a similar feeling of contrasts, duality and extreme irony by way of those high fashion powers.

Theo Sion and Alice Goddard nod to the past to look forward. The model Piers Rochford is juxtaposed in stark black-white resolution against a rusted, ramshackle foundation separated by technicolor foam fingers from Stefan Cooke's runway show. The striking visual effect displaces the model from material world to an austere place filled without commercial concerns. Sion and Goddard revolt in fashion by making the image their new fashion system. No try hard campaign imagery here. Sorry, no Stefan Cooke x Mulberry bags here either. Stefan Cooke takes ‘Away’ anything that is not essential or authentic. All that remains is reality, when you can only afford your dreams.