The Youth Will Surprise You

Esquire Singapore speaks to local design label, Youths in Balaclava, to find out more about the enigmatic design collective.

- Eugene Lim

It is hard to quantify the meteoritic rise of Youths in Balaclava. For the fear for being reductive, it seems like this group of young designers came out of nowhere to launch a book at Dover Street Market (DSM) Singapore. And in a huge achievement for a local label, Youths in Balaclava counts the retail institution as one of its stockists. Overseas media outlets are quick to label them as the anarchic voice in Singapore. So we decided to speak to the collective to find out more about their origin story and to meet Ryan O’Toole Collett who photographed their book and their recent presentation in Paris.

ESQ: How did you all meet?

TAUFYQ ISKANDAR: We met at Gan Eng Seng Secondary School. We were friends from different cliques. I met Spencer first, I met Yi Chen and the rest afterwards, and then kind of got them all to hang out together.

ESQ: What led you to start this collective?

TAUFYQ ISKANDAR: Me and Spence always had this interest in fashion. [But it started with] the music that we were listening to at that time. Spence was into K-pop and I liked Guns and Roses, Jimi Hendrix and all that. So we found something in common that we felt we could do. We were working in different retail stores and picking things up along the way like managing a store, seasonal launches. At the same time, I was learning basic Photoshop and creating graphics. It started as a hobby. We didn’t think it would be something of a huge scale. There were a lot of things popping up, like the local retail store Alley, but they weren’t selling many local labels. We decided to take the whole thing to a different aspect, to elevate it. That was when it became interesting.

ESQ: What was the first collection like?