© @ceceliamaduekwe
Text by Irina RUSINOVICH
For SS27, YAKU looks at family memory as a living, unstable archive, where ordinary stories slowly acquire the scale of mythology.
The collection begins with a family barbecue, although the setting quickly becomes much less literal than it first appears. Grandad, one of YAKU’s recurring characters, and his grandchildren return to memories of meals, conversations, games and people from earlier years, allowing these recollections to shift as they are retold. Familiar scenes become slightly distorted, details move, and ordinary family history begins to take on the quality of folklore.
YAKU’s approach to memory is where the collection becomes especially convincing, because it treats family history as something that keeps changing rather than something preserved intact
The starting point for the collection came from looking at parents and grandparents as what YAKU describes as “living libraries”, carrying stories from lives that existed before our own. As those stories travel backwards through generations, they become harder to separate from embellishment and invention, while childhood memories develop their own sense of scale, where an afternoon game or a digital world can feel as vast as an entire universe.
© studio@yaku.uk
This is also where the collection avoids becoming a simple exercise in nostalgia. The references are personal, yet many of them are immediately recognisable: an uncle teaching self-defence, an older sibling remembered as impossibly cool, or the moment a child sees a parent behaving outside the role they had assigned to them. YAKU takes these small domestic histories seriously and gives them the same attention previously directed towards more distant, imagined or prehistoric worlds.
The clothes, casting and performance follow the same logic, with characters becoming heightened versions of people who might once have existed inside a family story. Humour sits alongside awkwardness, affection and exaggeration, while the styling allows each figure to feel as though they have been reconstructed from memory rather than observed in the present.
There is also a quieter layer running through the project, connected to the way family histories disappear. Grandparents die, homes change, faces become harder to place, and stories gradually lose the people who originally told them. What survives is often a combination of memory, repetition and invention, carrying its own emotional truth even when the details can no longer be verified.
YAKU uses that instability as part of the collection’s visual language, allowing memory to remain fragmented, exaggerated and occasionally absurd while still rooted in experiences that feel surprisingly familiar.
Perhaps that is why „Can’t Rush Cooked Food “ feels so coherent within YAKU’s wider universe. The collection expands its fictional world through material that is deeply ordinary, where family gatherings, childhood games and half-remembered conversations become enough to construct an entire mythology.
© studio@yaku.uk
YAKU SS27
Can’t Rush Cooked Food
London Fashion Week
Performance Director: Dermot Daly
Movement Direction: Gabi Wolosik
Set Design & Development: Sookyung Kim
Production: Brian Jones & Blonstein Productions
Make Up: Michelle Dacillo
Hair: Richard Phillipart
Photography: Morgan Williams, Oscar Finnie, Mossy McDermott and FKY.AVI
Lookbook by @oscarfinnieoscarfinnie
Runway by @morganwlms
Details by @ceceliamaduekwe
