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.
