My name is Jekeun Cho. I was born in South Korea, with Japanese heritage and Chinese background. I moved to London to study fashion, which is where I am currently and where I founded my menswear ready-to-wear brand, Jekeun.

I’ve loved fashion since my teen years. My idol was Hedi Slimane, I bought everything I could whenever I had money, but I never thought I could be a fashion designer because I’m from a very ordinary family, so I decided on a safer university route. After graduating from Fudan, I was acting idle on a friend’s sofa in Shanghai waiting for job interviews. My friend was a film fanatic whose sister was an actress. He introduced me to the film In the Mood for Love and I absolutely loved it, it changed my life ever since (I’m going to watch it again at the cinema tonight).
I was in awe with all the moods from the film, everything about it fascinates me, the feeling of it and all the in/out metaphors by sensitive touches. I’ve loved the director Wong Kar-wai ever since and admire a lot more the cinematographer, Christopher Doyle. He served the scenes very carefully and beautifully and it pushed me to do something more with life rather than settling. This was around age 26 that I decided I would do whatever it takes to become a fashion designer.

I am the unusual one of the family, none of my family work in or are interested in fashion except my beloved Japanese great-grandmother who was a seamstress. She moved to South Korea from Japan for love. Sadly, my great-grandfather died a few years after, and she had to survive with two kids in a foreign land. All she had was an old sewing machine, so she used it to make and alter clothes for people in the village. I am keeping the machine with me; she continues to inspire me.

I generally love the structure of menswear. Solid chests, shoulder lines, cuts, open pockets from a long history of functional reasoning. I genuinely love to see how they work together to make a man look great like wearing armour and a man in armour may not be a soldier. The best part is I can play them to pain and twist my own story.

I can’t remember it that clearly because it was so hectic, and it went so quickly but it was an amazing experience. It was fun but the journey wasn’t easy. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I lacked skill and experience compared to my colleagues, but it could also be the fact that I was working from a blank state that contributed in my favour. Seeing my pieces alongside everyone else on the runway made me feel like I was in the same bracket but equally, I felt that I had so much more work to put in if this was ever going to happen for me again.

We all have our own narratives and difficulties. We believe all the struggles are from what we can see and what we can’t see. We want to express this concept metaphorically in fashion. So, our core idea of the brand is to discuss this topic and make agendas through our methodology, fashion. We use a lot of bold colours so that on the surface, people see the vibrancy of the brand. However, we draw on elements of depression when starting a new collection. These depressed elements slowly vanish until the end which remains as a silhouette, hidden details but unexpected and the entire mood of the collection.
Our Spring/Summer 2023 collection, Walking Contradiction, continues to explore our core concept of conflict between what we can see and its literal state. We use silhouettes from vintage military uniforms which represent ideas of masculinity. We transform these silhouettes with incompatible components such as bold colours and hunched shoulders to show a lack of confidence. The patterns from the fur coats and the textiles on the knitwear are from brain-scanning images of people with depression. We took our photo shoot in a closed space, with a few models with dim but contrasted lights. We think it gives the right tension and mood that we wanted to show.

These colours are a tribute to people like me, who wear dull clothing to hide or blend in instead of expressing themselves. I like all colours. I really like forest green, orange, ultramarine and coral at the moment (I might like neon pink more than orange later). There is not a particular colour I don’t like, it depends on how comfortable they feel in your eyes not because they are wrong but I’m trying not to use more than four colours in a look and, of course, I need black and white to support other colours.
I really respect Walter Van Beirendonck, I love his way of expressing colour. He comes across as brave, strong, and youthful. I had a chance to do an internship with him and to this day I still feel upset about the fact that I couldn’t do it.

Every time I go back to Seoul to see my family, I am always surprised by how quickly things shift. Men wearing makeup is nothing new in Seoul, people are not afraid to get on board with new styles and are very keen to taste new things. Shops are rushing to present new trendy spaces competitively. People then experience them and develop them with their existing culture. That is one of the reasons why Korean culture has become so popular. There are still a few questions, but I personally insist Seoul will be one of the fashion cities very soon. Also, Shanghai is one of my favourite cities. It is filled with a new generation of fashion innovators. They are wild and brave; I always enjoy seeing what they will create.

My near future plan is to keep pushing myself and pushing forward in the creative process to create something of significance to communicate with my audience. I also want to focus on how I can contribute to mental health awareness, I hope to collaborate with mental health organisations to make headway with the cause. I personally feel mental health is a huge part of the brands' existence. It would of course be a dream to see my work on the catwalk. If I work hard enough, that dream will be a reality.