Singapore’s very own punk rock fashion label, Youths in Balaclava – RADII

Youths in Balaclava (YIB) is a Singaporean fashion brand that has embodied rock and youth culture in its many amorphous forms since its official inception in 2018. The self-described group of outsiders met during their teenage years as classmates or friends of friends. At the center of this chaotic crew is Taufiq Iskandar, a kind of instigator who brings together disparate individuals and elements through friendship, music and culture.

When I spoke to Taufiq, I wanted to expose the early days of YIB. In less than ten years, the group has achieved what many designers can only dream of, and more; they caught the attention of Adrian Joffe of Dover Street Market, are stocked worldwide, have their seasonal showroom in Paris and design collaborations with Converse and G-Shock. Recently, the brand has also entered celebrity wardrobes, as seen on Puerto Rican singers and others Ozunasinger-rapper Zico and K-pop groups such as ITZY and NewJeans.

The laundry list goes on. It’s better to hear the backstory from the horse’s mouth. Taufiq makes a video call with me after I confirm a time at the last minute, with the call screen on Google Meets revealing a 27-year-old, curly-haired, bandana-wearing boy in a lighted storage room somewhere in Jalan Pemimpin, an area used by Singaporean designers and creatives have been moving their studios in recent years.

The following text has been edited for brevity:

I founded the brand together with the friends I made at Gan Eng Seng Secondary School. There is also my brother, just like my real blood brother, Kasyfi. It’s been almost 10 years. We learned how to make clothes, right down to presenting them at Paris Fashion Week. And finally we are now in a different phase of life. Some of them want to settle down, they want to buy a house. So they take a backseat to finding more income to support themselves, even though they still partially own the brand. At the moment only me and my brother are active at YIB.

To answer your first question, which is to describe YIB in three words, off the top of my head: enigmatic, chaotic and driven.

When I first started, I made clothes for our clique for fun. I met Spencer because he was my assigned seat partner. I met Yi Chen and Michael a year later. At first they didn’t care about fashion. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, you know these shoes. Look at these shoes. Have you seen this shirt? Look at this shirt.” Zach was my oldest. I met him when he helped me get a part-time job at Topshop and we became much closer as a result.

Spencer was into the computer game Cyber ​​​​Attack and he was also into music. At that time I was listening to rock like Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones and Guns N’ Roses and stuff. I was always really fascinated by what they were wearing. And I think that sparked my interest in fashion, the culture that surrounded it.

Back then, our fashion world was what we could find in Haji Lane. I started designing clothes that we would wear together, for when we went out or for their birthdays. They were all parody shirts. I made a Raf Simmons inspired graphic shirt for my friend. And for Zach, I liked this Versace logo, where it says Zach-ACE, you know, and his face is there. I thought it was quite funny. Those were the formative years for us.

Our first line of t-shirts came about because we heard from my family member, who heard from his friend, about this town in Indonesia that had a whole screen printing setup run by a whole community of artists. We all took a six-hour bus ride to this place together. We ended up making our first line of YIB t-shirts. From the profits from selling the t-shirts, we started experimenting with different things. As people started liking them and it started selling, we got more excited.

I learned more about other designers. My first designer, and still my hero today, is Margiela. You know, I took his spirit of being anonymous, that’s how the name Youths in Balaclava was born. It’s not about us, it’s about the work we produce. So that became the DNA.

Since we had no prior knowledge of making clothes, we learned by trial and error. With the money from selling t-shirts, we went out and bought fabric, did our own measurements, and even hand-crafted the washcloths ourselves. Thanks to Margiela, we even tried using wall paint on our clothes. That was how we did things.

The third collection was enormous. It started because I remember writing to fashion companies for access to their fashion shows, or like Singapore Fashion Week, but I kept getting rejected. So we had this vendetta and the decision of “I’m going to do my own fashion show.” For our DIY catwalk we collaborated with the visual art collective soft/WALL/studs. They had a roof that we used as a venue. Our chairs were borrowed from the coffee shop uncle. I remember we always argued with him, but on that day itself we begged him to lend us his chairs for $50, and he actually came through.

I was into grunge music at the time, the concept of the collection was inspired by the way Kurt Cobain designed his Jag-Stang, a mix of a Jaguar Fender and the Fender Mustang. He took a Polaroid of each guitar, cut it out and dissected the images, then pasted them into a collage. That’s what I envisioned the garments to be. So we took a lot of materials that matched what the Seattle scene would wear – flannel pants, Chicago shorts, granny shirts, ripped jeans and the like – and styled it ourselves. We didn’t have much money, so we took the fabric we already had and built and deconstructed a collection from discarded items.

Taufiq Rahman, the photographer, helped us find the models for that show. He is also the one who initially took all our photos. He had a very important aesthetic influence in the early years of YIB.

That was the last thing we did before we decided to take a break before going to polytechnic and just hang out for fun. We didn’t even think about starting a brand. We were photographed by Ryan O’Toole Collett as crew when we showed him around Singapore when Dover Street Market was about to open in Singapore. We were discovered by Adrian Joffe via a roll of film that Collett turned in for a project and everyone knows the rest.

I mean, I don’t want to talk about our heritage because it will sound arrogant. We have to date nine seasons in Paris. We did the showrooms and last year we finally had a runway schedule. It feels like I’ve already had all my wishes. But I still have this desire. You know how every city has its own style, like London is experimental, Paris has houses like Dior, I want YIB to become the fashion aesthetic for Singapore.

In recent years I have also helped some local punk bands with their styling and image. In the past me and the YIB guys would go to hardcore punk shows – a lot of bands like Fuse, Hollow Thread and Fader have now disbanded or changed their sound – we were judged a bit because of the way we dressed. But I think now, with the success of YIB and other more stylish bands, local musicians are seeing how fashion can help them communicate their music too.

I don’t think the fashion scene in Singapore needs to change. I see a lot of small brands and younger creatives starting their own brands. They sometimes come to me to ask for advice, but I think what they are doing now is great and they should just keep going. The fact that YIB is a well-known brand has shown others that it is possible to run a fashion label even in a city like Singapore.

Banner image by Haedi Yue.