16 November
A Child Of The Jago
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Click here for map to the A Child Of The Jago shop.
A Child Of The Jago is a child of the street. The destitute and illegitimate progeny of a hopelessly rundown environment.
In the case of Joseph Corre and Simon “Barnzley” Armitage, the street is Great Eastern and the physical environment is a former Victorian slum in East London where the alley wise hero of Arthur Morrison’s book, A Child of the Jago takes place. But the spiritual environment that has catalysed Corre and Armitage’s enterprise is an even more threatening and sprawling slum, that of the creatively impoverished and commercially corrupt homogeny represented by the menswear status quo.
Corre and Armitage are acutely aware that the world their new child is entering will offer it no sympathy and give it no quarter. A Child of the Jago isn’t being raised to expect a warm welcome. It’s being brought up to cause trouble while it contrives to raise the bar.
The zeal for agitation is a natural extension of the pair’s stylistic inspirations. The attitude reflects the sartorial excesses of the original dandy and the raw unpredictable razor’s edge of Rock & Roll stitched together with the excruciatingly rigorous standards of the Saville Row tailoring tradition. This all makes for a volatile cocktail of no-rules merchandising. Milkman jackets reminiscent of work wear’s golden age are presented alongside Scottish cashmere and fine shirting crafted in Jermyn Street factories. At the same time the tyranny of forced fashion “cycles” and industrially contrived “trends” receive a brutal Liverpool kiss-off, neutralised and dismissed as waste-creating crutches habitually brandished by brain-dead corporations well and truly only in it for the money.
But neither Corre nor Armitage are interested in disposable rebellion or a shallow veneer of style. They don’t believe standards of quality have been lost so much as they have been stolen, kidnapped, hijacked and brutalised by the mainstream fashion system. And they clearly don’t care how much shoe leather is worn away in their efforts to free quality from its current confinement. They have wired together a clandestine alternative network that unifies select Saville Row tailors with irreverent young talents from Japan’s best fashion academies. They have identified hole-in-the-wall suppliers of ultra-premium deadstock menswear fabrics and implicated them deep within their plot. Maneuvers that combine with their abandonment of artificial fashion cycles and grant them access to the best pure wools, rich silks, sharp gabardines, rugged twills and a host of one-of-a-kind yard goods of unrivaled quality that can otherwise stack up in the dust left by built-in-obsolescence and an inefficient and cynical marketing system.
Almost by accident their provocative approach ensures their own product, the dangerously named “Terrorist” collection, bares certain highly desirable market characteristics.
Intentionally Local and Accidently Sustainable
It is good for the ecology if folks are granted access to quality and discontinue thinking of clothing as disposable. Garments created with care from the best locally produced material the way Corre and Armitage are making them get better with age, not worse. The notion that waste could be dramatically reduced merely by a systematic revolt against the calculated cycling of prepackaged trends is not theoretical, it’s very definitely real. Not afraid to antagonise a bully, their child of the Jago is doing its part right in their own backyard. If customers adopted this attitude en masse it would doubtless herald the end of waste in fashion altogether. Goliath would fall and David would remain standing and David would be better dressed than ever.
Exclusive and Richly Storied
It is also good for customers to gain access to something genuinely unique. As individual as a human heart, Corre and Armitage’s designs are rendered in fabric combinations that could literally never be reproduced. So if desire for exclusivity and products with real narrative are on the rise, then A Child Of The Jago is stomping impertinently in the right direction.
The highly combustible flashpoint of the concept is the store itself. Designed after scenic illustrations of Hogarth’s Gin Lane, the finished space provides a languid and lurid framework for the full Terrorist collection as well as a dedicated bespoke tailoring service that employs the same remarkable dead stock fabrics.
The basement houses a lush gallery of carefully curated vintage that is treated as a purebred cousin and sold right alongside their own creations. One can expect to see everything from Napoleonic uniforms to antique French work wear along with complimenting curiosa like the leather-and-brass artificial leg of a long dead Hell’s Angel gang member, classic Rock & Roll 45s and 12” disco singles and an extensive library of out-of-print outré literature and underground artifacts from all across Europe. There is a bit of the feeling that you’ve stumbled across some nameless nobility on the downslide, who has been forced to sell off the family silver.
A Child Of The Jago’s concept and Corre and Armitage’s Terrorist menswear label carry the distinct odour of something incendiary and there’s a chance something really might burn. But the most flammable materials in its path seem to be the creative mediocrity and depressing absence of quality that have grown like dry weeds across the current fashion landscape. If this detritus burns off it will only serve to enrich the earth and ensure the new soil is fertile enough to nourish the stylistic bravery and deep quality that their new vision proposes.
written by Liam Maher
