A CHILD OF THE JAGO

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 (Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLarens sons and of Agent Provocateur) and Simon “Barnzley” Armitage,(Zoltar) 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. 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. 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.