Stefan Cooke approached Spring Summer 2026 collection through the lens of retail culture. The collection, titled Illusion Ascends, examined how independent shops foster identity and how archival references can be reassembled into clothing that speaks of community as much as construction.
The designers described the store they opened in November of the previous year as a catalyst for this thinking. That space showed them how a shop functions beyond commerce, acting as a place where people gather and a language of style develops. They called retail site-specific, rare in its qualities, and inclusive in its reach – conditions that directly shaped the collection presented this season.
Past examples confirmed their observations. Canadian brand Parachute, created by Nicola Pelly and Harry Parnass, supported the New Wave community in Montreal before expanding into New York and Los Angeles. Its shops worked like immersive sets where clothes, hair, and make-up combined into cultural identity. Cooke acknowledged that history as a model for what independent stores can achieve in shaping subcultures.
Photography provided another anchor. Amy Arbus documented Downtown New York for the Village Voice during the 1980s, portraying figures who styled themselves into characters through eclectic combinations. Her archive captured collage as identity, and that principle fed directly into the construction of Illusion Ascends collection.
The process combined garments from Cooke’s own archive with discoveries made on research trips. Outfits were built as layered characters, assembled to reflect the collage quality of Arbus’s portraits. To reinforce the role of community, the designers photographed the collection on people connected to their store, placing collection back into the environment that inspired it.
These ideas found physical form in tailored trousers cut in cream wool, pleated both vertically and horizontally, dropped at the crotch and cropped at the ankle. A surplus flight jacket in treated British cotton added density, its surface punctuated with zips in hues of lilac, moss, butter, blood orange, and sand. A baseball cap embroidered with Illusion Ascends fixed the title of the collection directly to the garments. Each piece tied construction to concept, showing how design becomes cultural evidence.
The name itself carried layered meaning. Illusion referenced the collage styling that produced characters through combined garments. Ascends suggested the cultural rise of independent shops, where menswear gathers significance inside communities that use retail as their stage.
Stefan Cooke used Spring Summer 2026 collection to argue that fashion develops its clearest language when tied to the spaces that give it life.
