What happens when you remove one of the materials most closely associated with your brand? Tokyo James set himself that challenge for his spring 2027 collection, titled “Identity.” “We’re known for tailoring and a lot of leather work,” he said from Lagos, but this season leather was dramatically reduced. Instead, he wanted to return to an earlier instinct of the label: taking a material and seeing just how far it could be pushed.
The experiment started shortly after the February shows, with deadstock lying around the studio. James and his team spent months testing techniques before they began making the collection. “We were still figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and what would look amazing,” he said. Eventually, a single sheer silk organza became the basis for much of the collection. Ruching, layering, fusing, crushing, and pleating transformed it almost beyond recognition. “You would think that it’s different fabrics,” James said, “but it’s one that has been manipulated to look like multiple different things.”
The most striking transformation was also the designer’s favorite look: a blue jacket and trouser that appeared, down to the topstitching and gold buttons, to be denim. It was, in fact, silk organza. “If you wear it, it feels like paper. It’s so light,” he said. “We were apprehensive at first, but when we did it again and again and again, and we saw that we could perfect the technique, that’s how we decided to just make it into denim.” Elsewhere, a recurring star-like motif came from one of James’s grandmother’s old wrappers, later passed down to his mother. “I asked her what this motif was about,” he recalled. “She was just like, ‘Oh, it was a motif that they used during their time for their wedding.’” James lifted it from the family textile and turned it into a monogram that appeared across several looks, introducing inheritance into a collection otherwise preoccupied with transformation.
On a black leather jacket, meanwhile, thick laces were braided and woven through the surface, a technique James connected to cornrows. Ivory, black, gray, blue, and burgundy were punctuated with streaks and tufts of orange, cobalt, peach, and cream. Feathers sourced locally in Lagos were treated and recolored in the studio before being attached to jackets, dresses, shoes, and bags. Many of the accessories had themselves been carried over and upcycled from previous seasons, extending the collection’s interest in changing the identity of things already at hand. As James put it, “How do you transform the normal into something new?” Spring suggested that, for his label, the answer lies less in what a garment starts as than in everything that happens to it along the way.
