How the Men of London’s East End Inspired Derrick’s Elegant Tailoring

This year in the UK, summer never really came. With the exception of a few days of sun, skies remained ominously grey, temperatures stayed cool, and the country was lashed mercilessly with record amounts of rainfall. While other designers might have used these months to burrow into fantasy as a form of escape, Luke Derrick’s thoughts have been very much rooted in reality. “I’m quite critical of a lot of the seasonal tropes, like, ‘We’re going to do shorts and it’s this guy at the beach,’” the Central Saint Martins graduate explains in tiny studio space on Bethnal Green Road, where the 6’5” designer towers in a white tee and vintage army trousers. “It just doesn’t equate when we’re in London in 2024 … there’s economic downturn, global conflict and lots of things going on.”

Unveiled in February to a clattering iPhone recording of his 2am commute to his Spitalfields flat, Derrick’s debut collection Nightwalking told a story of dishevelled elegance lit by the glow of streetlight. Drawing upon his Savile Row training and unfussy personal uniform, it saw wrinkle-proof practical fabrics like nylon masquerade as silk in a series of gorgeously restrained tailored shapes. Beyond being beautiful, the designs were deceptively clever – these were clothes made for the man who goes out all night, sleeps through his alarm and still manages to head out the door without a crease in his jacket.

Shown yesterday evening at 180 The Strand, Derrick’s sophomore collection picked up where the last left off, quite literally imagining “the morning after Nightwalking”. It was the product of two cancelled holidays and a summer spent observing life on the noisy, rain-puddled streets of the East End. Building upon ideas of lazy sophistication, it saw Derrick push himself out of his dark monochromatic safety zone into lightness and colour. A contrast to the gorpcore brigade of Broadway Market, Derrick’s men appeared in classically beautiful looks that were sneakily practical, hewn in featherlight waterproof nylons and cottons made for muggy heat and surprise downpours.

Bright purples, burnt oranges and dusty pink shades were borrowed from the clothing worn by men of south Asian and Middle Eastern communities that reside on Bethnal Green Road, while certain shapes – such as a hyper-tapered trousers that could be mistaken as riding pants – were inspired by tracksuits. As a privately educated, Oxford-born designer, Derrick was cautious not to stray into cultural appropriation, instead attempting to sensitively weave together menswear codes with the hope of “building a modern idea of what British elegance is”.

Here, in his own words, Luke Derrick tells the story of the collection.

“I’ve been working on the collection actively since about April. The reality of my summer was two cancelled holidays and a lot of rain. I had this one little trip away to a wedding just outside of Paris, which was really nice but I left early to keep working on the collection. That trip was a reminder to me because if I do go away, under my bed I have this whole separate wardrobe of all these amazing shirts I picked up at charity shops. These shirts exist in a sort of vacuum, because I only wear them when I’m in other countries. I have a very different way of dressing when I’m abroad, but if I designed this man in London, what am I making him?

“There’s this black fabric that I started with, which has this subtle floral in it. I felt like it was a really nice way to start because it’s like this shirt for a holiday that you didn’t go on but that you still wear to the office. I’ve got quite a traditionalist background, I interned at Dunhill, Brioni, [Alexander] McQueen, and on Savile Row. It’s great to have that as a base, but then, having spent three years here in Bethnal Green, your exposure to real life [comes into play]. You start to notice that a tuxedo stripe on a trouser is the same place as a tracksuit stripe.

“Generally, people think of my work as quite stark, black and monochromatic. Never before have I done this much colour. Most of my research tends to just be people I’m encountering, and on this street there’s a lot of men from Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Moroccan cultures. I’ll head out for lunch and there’ll be a guy in head to toe purple cotton and immaculate white Nike Air Maxs. He just exists in that colour. I trained in Italy and colour is like an expression and it’s a decision – it’s slightly peacocky. Looking at the people on my street, I started to be able to see colour in a way that isn’t self-conscious.

“It feels much richer to absorb how these different cultures are all kind of meshing together on this street, which is a little vignette of what the UK is, and celebrating that. It’s not about appropriation, it’s about acknowledging the day to day. It’s all little things, tailoring and shirts and universal codes of garments, and trying to accumulate all these different sensibilities. That, to me, feels much more modern and closer to what I’m trying to build as an idea of what British elegance is.

“Elegant is almost an annoying word because people have such set ideas of elegance, like dressing in this way which is impossibly smart. Actually, the person that had five minutes to get up in the morning and kind of looks a bit undone, to me that is chic. These are the clothes for the person who is not really on top of their shit, but that’s all kind of hidden and imbued. I quite enjoy that deception.”