CHUKS COLLINS

After Eden: Chuks Collins and the Art of Becoming

Words by Tessa Shaw

Chuks Collins doesn’t introduce himself as a fashion designer. He calls himself an artist, someone for whom clothing is simply one of many languages. That distinction matters. It explains why his Spring/Summer 2026 koleksyon, Eden Re-Imagined, feels less like a seasonal offering and more like a meditation: on rebirth, on survival, on the long, uneven work of becoming yourself.

Born in Coventry and raised between England and Nigeria, Collins grew up in motion. “My life was very, very different from everybody,” he says. “I would live three years in England, three years in Nigeria… I hated it. I didn’t have friends, because I had to always change.” There were foster parents in England, a strict grandmother in Nigeria, and an early lesson in how unstable a home can be.

It was this godmother who quietly altered the course of his life by teaching him to sew. By twelve, he’d made his first suits. Art became both escape and oxygen. “Art has always been a medium of expression for me, even in the midst of the chaos that I had as a child,” Li eksplike. When family fractures, identity questions, and adolescent anger became too much, he began to draw, building dark worlds, cartoon universes, alternative lives where he could control the ending.

Toujou, fashion was not a career anyone around him encouraged. “It wasn’t a respectable male profession,” he says. So he overcorrected in the most practical way: three bachelor’s degrees—accounting and finance, social work, and fine art—a pilot’s license, and eventually a move to the U.S. for fashion school and a master’s in international relations at Fordham, focused on youth and economic development. The path reads like several lives superimposed, but for Collins, it all connects. Service, structure, flight, care, creation; it’s all raw material for the clothes.

When he talks about his work now, the language is disarmingly intimate. A kidney transplant brought him to America; a long pattern of health crises has shaped how urgently he creates. “I’ve gone through near-death experiences with health,” he says. “It’s almost like I’ll have four years of everything going well, and the next two years I’m battling something. Each piece I create is like a story I’m telling of how I’m feeling at that particular time.”

That sense of survival and self-interrogation sits at the heart of Eden Re-Imagined, unveiled off-season at Bryant Park Grill in New York. Collins reworks the biblical Eden not as punishment but as a pivot point—a before-and-after moment of consciousness. Inspired by the instant of awakening, the collection reads Eden “not as exile, but as the beginning of consciousness. The moment humanity chooses to see itself fully,” with sculptural tailoring, fluid drapery, and a palette that moves from soft neutrals and earthen tones to urgent greens and reds.

“Pou mwen, Eeden Re-Imagined is the moment after awakening, when we understand both our light and our consequence,” Collins says. “I wanted to capture that tension, the quiet strength that comes from choosing to rebuild rather than retreat.” It’s a statement that could double as a synopsis of his own life. The collection’s sustainable textiles and hand-finished details extend his interest in conscious making. Toujou, the emotional charge comes from somewhere deeper, which is his refusal to romanticize pain without also insisting on transformation.

Collins describes clothing as “an armor that we wear… the first thing people see in us.” That frame carries a specific weight when you are a Black man designing in an industry that still defaults to white and male at the top. “Being a Black man in fashion, there’s a lot of stereotypes of what people want to expect,” he notes. “My brand is a bridge between Western and African fashion. I grew up in both places, and those are the things I infuse in my collection because that’s who I am.”

New York sharpened that perspective. When he first moved to the city, he would ride the subway from one end of the line to the other to watch how style shifted from borough to borough. English tailoring, Nigerian sculptural volume, Bronx swagger, he absorbed it all. “I bring English tailoring to my clothing, I bring color from Africa to my designs,” he says. “I think I dabble between a fine line of ethereal and architecture… You can see a piece that has corsets in it, but when it moves, you see a whole fluid drapery.” If the technical language is about cut and construction, the emotional language is about care. Collins’ work is rooted in women—the ones who raised him, believed in him, housed him, handed him his first sewing machine, and wore his earliest pieces. “I design for the girl in every woman and the woman in every girl,” he says, “who aspires to be an ambassador, a doctor, a lawyer, or even a housewife.” He sees every woman through three lenses: daughter, sister, partner. “Those are the women I interact with every day. I also see my mother in them.”

On the runway, that translates into casting that quietly rejects fashion’s narrow sample-size fantasy: pregnant models, a woman carrying her baby, plus-size bodies sharing space with size twos and fours. “The little that you can do contributes a lot,” he says. “Don’t think it’s little.” For Collins, diversity isn’t a campaign word; it’s an extension of gratitude. “Women have solely uplifted me,” he says simply. “So empowering them and making beautiful clothes not just for size twos and fours, but for the real women I grew up seeing, is very important for me.”

Social responsibility shows up off the runway, tròp. Alongside a friend, he co-founded the African Fashion Council to amplify African designers on global platforms, helping bring 7 African brands onto the official New York Fashion Week calendar. In Lagos, he’s opened an atelier connected to a nonprofit that trains survivors of domestic violence, a tribute to his mother’s own history. Patterns are drafted in New York, then sent to Nigeria, where a growing team of artisans executes resort pieces and print-driven looks that loop the brand’s supply chain back home.

All of this, health battles, diaspora movement, advocacy, spiritual questioning, feeds into his definition of fashion as service. “Each time I’m able to put something together, bring something to life, it gives me so much,” he says. “The higher level of joy is when somebody puts it on… When I see them feel empowered through my creation, it’s bliss for me. At the end of the day, it’s my calling to be of service to people.”

Looking ahead, Collins is thinking like an ecosystem, not just a label. After a strategic rebrand, his goals are clear: to build brand awareness and scale with intention. A Eden Re-Imagined collection launches the Eden Bag in apple leather, signaling a deeper push into accessories. There is a home line, bridal and bags on the horizon, plans for a permanent New York space after his residency at Berkeley College, renewed presence in England, and expanding production in Lagos. He’s collaborating on costumes for an upcoming series, developing a Pan-African fashion and food expo, and quietly imagining a return to teaching. “I don’t know it all,” he says. “I’m a student for life.”

In Collins’s hands, Eden is not a paradise lost but a beginning reclaimed. It’s a place you walk out of with more knowledge, more scars, more responsibility, and a new kind of grace. The clothes carry that story lightly: bias-cut dresses that move like breath, tailoring with a spine of architecture, armor that feels like tenderness. They are built for women who have lived through something and are still choosing to step out, fully awake, into the world.