A Low Profile for a Man of Manners : Designer: Joe Casely-Hayford describes his men’s and women’s designs as “classic but with a little element of interest.”
Joe Casley-Hayford is not the first name you might think of as a leader of Britain’s newer fashion designers. Nor is it the name his own parents might think of. In Ghana, his ancestors were lawyers and politicians. So when Casely-Hayford decided to pursue a fashion career, he made a break with tradition.
But not a complete break, he says. “There is a lot of power in clothing. People respond to each other on the basis of how they look.”
A man in his mid-30s, London-born Casely-Hayford started his own fashion company five years ago, having studied at St. Martins, the British school of art and design.
He describes his men’s and women’s designs as “classic but with a little element of interest.” In a recent men’s wear collection, that translated to well-tailored gray suits, except for the seams that were neatly opened to reveal a paisley print fabric that looked like the lining.
Casely-Hayford lives and works in Whitechapel, an East End neighborhood of narrow, crowded streets lined with small factories, run-down warehouses and occasional clusters of soot-stained Georgian row houses. The only clues that the neighborhood might have anything to do with fashion are the tiny scraps of fabric that litter the cobblestones, or the sudden glimpse through an open window of India-born laborers sitting in rows and sewing, their heads bent in concentration.
The designer--tall, courtly and dapper in a double-breasted gray flannel suit with stitched-down lapels of his own design--answers the door and quickly apologizes for the noise and clutter of his workroom. He shares a small office at the back of the loft with his wife, Maria, who runs the business side of the company, and also, on this particular morning, with his 9-month-old daughter, Alice.
The atmosphere is homey but not posh, and seemingly much removed from the lives of Casely-Hayford’s celebrity clients--Michael Jackson, Cher and Linda McCartney among them.
“We’ve also had a royal client, but I don’t remember her name,” he says, smiling, sincere, and soft-spoken, and also bashfully aware that he has just made an eyebrow-raising remark; the British press follows the wardrobes of the royals avidly and being selected by Princess Diana or Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, can bring a rush of publicity and a smart jump in sales.
It’s not that Casely-Hayford wasn’t happy to have a royal client, or that he wouldn’t be happy to have more, but that he is quite plainly more interested in designing his clothes than in keeping track of the celebrities who wear them.
He intentionally keeps his business small, he says. Last year’s sales were about $1.7 million. Instead of huge sales, he’s looking for recognition, which is starting to come his way. He has just been hired to design the collections of the well-established Italian label Panchetti, and last October he was nominated for the designer of the year award during British fashion week.
An even more important testimony to his talent is the roll of stores that carry his clothing, including Roppongi in Los Angeles, Charivari and Barneys in New York, and Bloomingdale’s and Saks nationwide. In London, Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Joseph and the trendy fashion-oriented specialty shop, Jones, on Kings Road carry his collections. He’s also becoming one of the darlings of the avant-garde fashion press, with his clothing appearing in such magazines as Details in the United States and Arena, England’s archly chic men’s magazine.
Beyond his personal preference for running a human-sized business, Casely-Hayford believes that another factor also keeps him from greater renown and larger sales volume.
“If I weren’t black my business would be three times larger by now,” he calmly explains. “But I want to be successful without having to apologize for my race. I want to do it with dignity and not take the rolling-eyes approach of some other black designers.”
“The rolling-eye approach” is his term for the way some black designers have tried to play upon their race and heritage, at the risk of reducing them to a stereotype, while others have chosen to fawn over buyers and editors in hopes of making sales and getting editorial coverage. His own response to the challenge presented by being black is simple, he says. “Make everything better.”
And, he says, being black offers him an entree to culturally rich worlds not familiar to everyone. “Part of my strength as a designer is being black, because it gives me access to a much broader social spectrum than might be available to a white designer.”
This is a complicated and gently ironic observation. Casely-Hayford’s grandfather was one of the most celebrated politicians in Ghana; his father is a London barrister. He grew up in Chelsea, the child of a distinguished and relatively privileged family, where, he says, his black heritage gave him broad access to the zestier elements of the city’s lively street life, the racially and ethnically mixed neighborhoods, which has provided him, as it has many other British designers, with a vital source of inspiration.
This gentle, thoughtful man recently expressed his personal beliefs about the environment in an ecology-themed collection, and he has just agreed to design special items as part of a benefit for the British ecological organization the Arts for the Earth. Yet, he is wary of being identified as a real ecologist.
“I try to be environmentally sound in every way that I can, personally, but no fashion designer can claim to be completely responsible in an ecological sense. You look at someone’s all-white collection, for example, and all you can think of is all the bleach that it took to create it.” (Environmentalists describe chemical bleach as a toxic pollutant or toxic trash.)
“A good designer is as much a mouthpiece for his age as any other artist. I’m trying to reflect what I see in society,” Casely-Hayford said. And what he sees in England is a “polarized society. People either see themselves as fitting into Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s England or they don’t, and street fashion here today is mostly an expression of contempt and rejection toward society.”
The clothes that express these feelings are an odd hybrid of American activewear (a hooded sweat shirt worn under a tweed blazer), ethnic print fabrics and authentic Arab accessories. The eclectic look has become a uniform for the nightclubs that are very much a part of the young scene here.
