NW This issue has come about partly from observing that the word “community” is everywhere, not least popping up in brand reports and campaigns. What do you think about brands pivoting to community? 

FD Brands have realised that forecasting and trend reports no longer work, so they’re latching on to what smaller brands like ours are doing. Bigger brands have huge resources to tap into that idea of “community” or “culture”. Yet while we don’t have the resources to create campaigns to talk about what we do, we do have an actual community. We’re not paying to create cultural relevance. We’re trying to educate kids about what their culture means, and its history. Take music, for example. Afrobeat has come to the forefront recently, but it has its roots in the West African genre of Highlife. It’s always good to go back to the past so that you can equip yourself with the knowledge to understand the future. It’s not just about the brand message; it’s deeper than that. 

NW It’s about the whole, rather than picking bits from here and there and making totems. 

FD Exactly. Everyone’s shouting about football at the moment, so a big brand goes and finds a football community, pushes a brand message, sells some products. Nothing goes back in. Let’s see how long it takes for bigger brands to jump onto the next thing, and then see if they give sustainable jobs to all these people they have picked up. 

NW Football has always been made up of all these different elements and complex histories – and the only time that many men have a strong opinion on fashion is when new kits come out. Did designing Arsenal’s 2024-25 away kits feel natural for you? 

FD I used to play football myself, so I understand it. But if the Arsenal idea wasn’t connected back to culture, and celebrating Arsenal’s African fan base, it would have been a very different conversation. To lift up and celebrate the club’s African fans resonated with me. The colours are of the Pan-African flag – that alone allows people to connect to the design, whether they support Arsenal or not. I thought, before we start doing anything, let’s look at the beginning of the story, when Africans started travelling to the West. In the 1920s, African countries began to become independent, and Africans were able to travel more widely. The zigzag patterns depict this. When you look at African masks and artefacts, they have a circular form, so the zigzag marked a change. 

NW Did period details inform the design, like popular 1920s fashion codes? 

FD Africans were inspired by music like calypso, and the clothes they used to wear were smart. A shirt and tie, tucked in nicely. If you dress like that, people consider you serious, important, educated. When people left Africa, they felt the need to present themselves well, but at the same time, they’d wear an African tie or a big agbada shirt. There’s so much volume on an agbada shirt and we combined that with normal tailoring, adding agbada volume at the front. When you move between cultures, you’re entwining the old and the new and creating something else. That’s something I learned from my parents. My mum would wear a very bold print with a nice pinstripe skirt, and the balance of that is what we’re trying to achieve. 

NW How do you approach the question of who represents the brand? When you held your runway show at the Emirates Stadium in September last year Declan Rice appeared. You also had two young men walking the runway who were Arsenal season-ticket holders.

FD Those two kids came to the casting and we had a conversation with them, and one of them said, “Oh, I love your brand, man; I love what you’ve done with the Arsenal kit. I’m an Arsenal fan.” Then you realise what it means to these kids. You saw it when Declan walked into the room where these kids were lining up, how they lost it. It was obvious that we had to cast these kids to walk in the show because it would mean more to them than it would to any model who doesn’t really give a shit about football. With Declan, that was God’s work, because he got a red card and couldn’t play the next game against Tottenham. Having him walk the show was so inspiring. It was the best thing we could ask for, and the club supported everything. It was beau- tiful to see how everything came together.

NW Do you care much about pushback from people who want the worlds of fashion and football to be kept separate?  

FD No. I’m old enough to know that not everybody will like everything. I have a story, I have a direction, a thing that I want to do. The world that we live in is not one in which a bunch of elites decide what we wear, or how a fashion brand should work, or how good a designer is. We’ve got to move up to the times. Like, where have you been?

NW Your tagline is “designed by an immigrant”. Last summer saw an outbreak of far-right violence directed at immigrants. Did it change your relationship to this central element of Labrum?

FD We always shout about being immigrants – it’s not a temporary interest. “Designed by an immigrant” is a platform to showcase and celebrate the work that immigrants have done and continue to do. Immigrants help build this country. With “designed by an immigrant”, we’re celebrating the beautiful work that immigrants are doing, and hopefully that will educate younger kids to see that these people are not their enemy. My son is four, and I’m always trying to let him understand people as people. When he comes back from nursery, all I ask is, “Who did you play with today?” .