Kenneth Ize didn’t need a mood board for his fall 2026 collection, because the collection itself is a whole mood, and that mood is joy. It was certainly evident from the minute the clothes appeared; chicer than chic, elegantly lean tailoring, sometimes deconstructed, or a study in contrasts between the front and the back, with Ize yet again making wonderful use of the traditional Nigerian woven fabric aso oke, all shimmering, vibrant color, something he has long incorporated into his clothing.
Ize, who is showing in Berlin for the first time after taking a bit of a sabbatical (more on that later), saw this new collection as a way to bring together all the people he loves. The label may bear his name, but it is the presence of friends and collaborators like photographer James Tennessee Briandt, NYC hatmaker Rodney Patterson of Esenshel, stylist KK Obi, leather recycling company founder Giovanni Mareschi, casting director Affa Osman, model agency owner Jd Ankomah, and Mumi Haiati of PR company Reference Studios, among others, who made it all possible. It’s them Ize wants to namecheck, not an assemblage of aesthetic reference points.
“I kept thinking, ‘What’s the reason for doing a collection again?’” Ize said backstage before his show. “It’s all about the people, and the joy I get from working with them. There’s so much happening in the world right now,” he went on to say, “what with the war in Sudan, Palestine…I thought that if I do a collection, I’m going to make it about togetherness.” Which is why he had Patterson contributing the Mad Hatter-esque top hats which added a delightfully off-kilter vibe to the looks, while the casting was done by Ankomah’s Rapture Management agency out of Antwerp. The whole production was a family affair.
Given his desire to bring together the inner emotion of the clothes’ creation with their outward appearance, Ize deconstructed his tailoring: A pair of trousers, say, might have their pockets reversed so they were inside out, or it may look like the model was wearing shorts over regular length pants (a strangely new but kind of cool thing here in Berlin). Elsewhere, jackets might have their usually hidden inside seams revealed, while the shoulders of a trench coat were scissored away to expose their construction. It was a constant dialogue about revealing what might be hidden, and amplifying all of it were those wonderful aso oke textiles, the very expression of the uplifting power of craft and community.
What was also on Ize’s mind was how he could express his work in a different medium: through words, and the power of description and analysis. The reason for that—and the reason for the sabbatical—is that Ize has enrolled in a doctorate program at a school in Vienna, his home since 2014, where he is studying for his PhD in philosophy, with a particular interest in the African diaspora in Europe and the United States. “It’s important for a young creative person, who’s a designer, or an artist,” Ize said, “to be able to think about, and write about, why they’re doing what they do. I took a small break with the brand and thought, I want to get into this.” Ize says he has two-or-so more years to go before he completes the PhD, and one thing he can say with certainty: He won’t be changing the name of his label to Dr. Kenneth Ize.
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