It’s 9am on a Tuesday morning and JJ Hudson has been talking about the apocalypse for the best part of ten minutes. “I’ve been preparing for it for years,” he says. “Actually, I used to describe what I do as ‘Bunker Love’ because if we all end up in a bunker the one thing I will enjoy myself doing is custom building stuff to wear while we’re stuck down there. That’s if we even make the bunker.” Otherwise known as NOKI, the king of Shoreditch, or the father of mash-up, Hudson has cut a strange figure within fashion ever since he arrived in London in the late 90s, his face completely obscured by a rotation of poke-hole masks.
Sitting front row at shows, he almost looks as though someone has cast a spell on a clothing bank, granting a jumble of secondhand fashion the ability to move and emote. His own creations, forged from scraps, rags, and bits of old clothes are inspired by the anarchism of hardcore, and present a challenge to form that continues to inspire designers today. Conner Ives, BUZIGAHILL, and Balenciaga are all indebted to Hudson’s violent twisting of consumerism, where sustainability and bootleg collaborations have been central to his practice. “I suppose it has just validated this crazy thing that happened in the 90s,” he says. And yet despite his impact on fashion, he is loath to call himself a designer, asking to be referred to, exclusively, as a textile artist.
Having come up alongside Judy Blame, Lulu Kennedy, and the YBAs back when Shoreditch was little more than a barren wasteland, Hudson played a foundational role in transforming east London into a creative honeypot, before working as a…