There is a particular kind of confidence that cannot be styled; it has to be earned. Complex Department‘s SS26/27 collection, BECOMING, is the sound of that confidence settling in. After Renaissance, a season that looked back toward inheritance and memory, Complex Department turns its gaze forward. BECOMING is not a new direction, it is the same direction, walked further. The house’s most unguarded collection to date, built from the accumulated weight of every risk it took to get here.
“After the renaissance comes the becoming,” says Founder and Creative Director Atanko David.
The line reads like a manifesto because it is one. Complex Department has always positioned itself as archival rather than aesthetic, a house more interested in cultural memory than seasonal trend. Becoming is what happens when that philosophy stops being aspiration and starts being infrastructure. This is about building systems, not just looks.
The proof is entirely in the production. Textiles were sourced and woven right in Kasoa, Ghana. Every single garment was tailored in-house at Complex Haus, the brand’s atelier and creative headquarters in Winneba, a space that functions as both factory and philosophy. Select pieces were developed in collaboration with Lagos-based artisan Ayinke, a partnership that reads less like outsourcing and more like genuine kinship. It is definitive proof of a pan-African creative network built over years of travel, trust, and shared risk.
Becoming does not perform community. It is produced by one.
The campaign was shot entirely within Complex Department’s own orbit, by its own people, for its own people. Photography is by Atmax Studios (Atanga Maxwell), whose lens has become inseparable from the brand’s visual language. The collection is worn by Isaac Addo, Michael, and Tyren, friends of the house long before they were faces of it. Behind the scenes, Papa Yaw Amankwaa, Kwame Booker, and Korea held the set together, serving as the unseen architecture behind every image. Hair was styled by Solène Hair, lending the campaign its final, polished signature.
This is the exact part of the process that other houses outsource. Complex Department insists on keeping it home, preserving the data and the discipline where it belongs. BECOMING is, in the end, a study in what happens when a brand stops asking for permission and starts operating as it has already arrived. Complex Department is not announcing growth. It is simply no longer hiding it.
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