Cktrl has collaborated with Bianca Saunders, Priya Ahluwalia, and Nicholas Daley, soundtracking the mythical utopias of Beyoncé’s Black Is King and Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton. Today, however, the future-jazz musician returns to Lewisham, where he stands in Ermenegildo Zegna AW21, lensed by Raffaele Cariou and styled by Mirko Pedone.
This season’s offering from the Italian fashion house is leisure luxurified. Think traditional tweeds repurposed into sportswear silhouettes, like shearling joggers, felted wide legs, caramel driving jackets, and cashmere turtlenecks, as seen here on Cktrl, who’s reflecting on all the sounds that made him. “I began making music when I got a copy of FruityLoops off my bredrin,” he says, noting how he still makes music on a clunky Windows XP machine. Around the corner – or, the page – fellow South Londoner Duval Timothy is wearing a blue cotton shackett by the label “as an homage to Lewisham – Blue Borough”. But Timothy, a nomad by nature, could just as easily be wearing the colour to honour the Sierra Leonean flag, where he splits his time producing tracks for Solange, Vegyn, and Loyle Carner.
While his practice spans music, zines, fine art, and curation, Timothy admits that “it’s taken me a while to realise that it’s OK to just make stuff and be open to it growing in unexpected ways”. It’s a freewheeling spirit shared by Azekel Adesuyi, a Hackney-born R&B musician who credits his creativity to being able to “exist in different communities through collaboration”. Enveloped in a cloaking apricot scarf and a deep-grooved, olive sweater from the label’s lockdown collection, Azekel’s own experience of the pandemic also happened to yield unexpected goods. “The loss of connection brought a lot of self-reflection,” he says, “this EP explores the different aspects of love in my life – parental, romantic, and sexual. It was made through the pandemic, amid all the difficulties brought on by that.”
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