This Friday (Nov. 6), Skepta releases his sixth solo studio album, The Fork & Knife—his first in more than seven years. In that time, his wardrobe has evolved too: the tracksuits he once favoured have made room for tailoring, though these days he’s just as likely to wear both at once.
Across two decades, the grime star’s wardrobe has been a reliable lie detector: when he dresses like everyone else, he loses the plot; when he strips it back, he sets the template. Grime was never a flashy genre—where UK garage had favoured glitzy get-ups, grime artists opted for tracksuits and trainers, with a few holdovers like Avirex jackets and fitted hats. Status came from looking sharp rather than loud, and where you were from showed in your clothes as much as your bars.
In the early days, Skepta fitted right in. By the early 2010s, almost a decade into his career, he had strayed into pop-grime, as so many of his peers had. By 2016, he was back to basics, and when he won the Mercury Prize for Konnichiwa, he walked up to collect it in a plain all-black outfit. At a time when few others were doing the same, he cut through the bling with a minimal look, making restraint a flex in itself. Less, it turned out, was a lot more. That restraint turned him into an elite tastemaker: Kanye West had already pulled him on stage at The Brit Awards, and Drake (who has his very own BBK tattoo) was in his corner too. A look built on a North LDN estate was suddenly being copied thousands of miles away. Then came MAINS, the label he launched, paused and eventually revived, plus trainer lines with both Nike and Puma. For many of Britain’s young artists today, Skepta set the blueprint, proving that what you wear can be as much a statement of identity as the music you make.
Here, we trace the key style eras and fashion moments of a man whose constant reinvention has helped rewrite the dress code for British music, influencing generations of artists along the way.
Signature items: Dog-ear hats, Boy Better Know t-shirts
Skepta, who in the early 2000s was a local DJ known as Moschino Joe in Tottenham, North London, made his first mark as a grime MC in 2005, when his Meridian Crew disbanded and police confiscated his records, prompting him to pick up the mic. He later formed Boy Better Know with his brother, Jme. Independence from major labels was the point: they printed their own T-shirts and sold them out of an Edmonton corner shop, while selling mixtapes straight from their car boots. Around this time, the dog-ear hat became a fixture of Skepta’s look, appearing in Simon Wheatley’s portrait of him at Chick-King (yes, the one from Chip’s “Who Are You?” music video) and on the cover of his unofficial, street-pressed debut mixtape, Joseph Junior Adenuga. It became so closely associated with him that, in certain circles, they were simply known as “Skepta hats.” He’s since brought them back under MAINS, while Peak Television even released a “2005 Skepta” dog-ear hat in homage.
Signature items: Ed Hardy watches, jeans, belts and the rest
Skepta’s debut studio album, the ambitiously-titled Greatest Hits, arrived in 2007. By 2008, he had his breakthrough single, “Rolex Sweep”, which peaked at No. 89 in the charts. The video finds him down the pub in an all-white slim-fit suit—bowler hat and all. He was dressing more expensively now, and certainly more colourfully. His second album, 2009’s Microphone Champion, is notable on the fashion front for “Ed Hardy Party”, if nothing else. He wore the brand on Tim Westwood’s show for “the UK’s biggest ever freestyle” and scarcely took off his gaudy jacket during his first-ever tour. The romance ended in the early 2010s when, as he put it, he “started to see it in abundance and people with no swag wearing Ed Hardy.” He gave it all to charity, so somewhere, someone got very lucky. Maybe even fakemink, who wears the brand on the cover of their recent collab track, “Chiltern Firehouse”, where Skepta does too (in archive imagery, of course). Ed Hardy may be, at least partly, to blame for the Americanisation that came next.
Signature items: Low-slung BBK chain, snapback hats, sunglasses (at night)
The rollout for Skepta’s third album, Doin’ It Again, began in 2010, and by its 2011 release, his style had swung firmly towards the charts: a Bulls snapback, light-wash jeans that looked lifted from a U.S. rap blog, and a chain slung low where the BBK tee used to be. Add a flashy music video or two and the picture was complete. Grime was chasing radio, and the wardrobe followed, borrowing from the American streetwear template rather than anything from Tottenham or Bow. It’s probably the least distinctive Skepta has ever looked, and for years afterwards, everything he did seemed designed to put as much distance between himself and that era as possible.
Signature items: Bright coloured jackets, gold watches, teashades
Doin’ It Again, while not as critically acclaimed as his other releases, was a chart success, just cracking the Top 20. By 2012, Skepta was already rolling out an even more commercial follow-up, The Honeymoon, when he realised he was losing his artistic identity and scrapped it. To win back his day-ones and return to his roots, he went back to the drawing board and independently released the landmark mixtape, Blacklisted. The music was stripped-back and more grounded, but the clothes hadn’t quite caught up. The “Ace Hood Flow” music video finds him in a loud, baroque silk shirt, gold jewellery and teashade glasses (which stuck around for a good while yet). Elsewhere, he was rarely seen without an eyesore jacket, whether in the “Straight Up” remix video or at various media events.
Signature items: All-white and all-black tracksuits, Nasir Mazhar everything
These are perhaps the two most important years in Skepta’s history as an artist. In March 2014, he kickstarted his comeback with a verse on Meridian Dan’s “German Whip” remix. In April came “That’s Not Me” with his brother Jme, in which he explicitly rejected luxury fashion, with Gucci first in the bin. The video cost just £80 and finds him in a simple all-black get-up, MCing in front of his own archive footage. Weeks later, he took to the runway for young London designer Nasir Mazhar, then the talk of the town for his Bully caps. It was a rare moment for a designer so revered by the fashion industry to put grime on the runway in this way. Skepta strutted down it in a bespoke black, masked “roadman jacket”, zipped up to reveal only his eyes—a far cry from the loud, tell-all look of before.
Later that year, he dropped “It Ain’t Safe” with A$AP Bari, an authentic grime and U.S. rap crossover, miles from his earlier attempts (see: “Hello Good Morning” with Diddy Dirty Money). In 2015, Kanye brought Skepta and a whole cohort of grime MCs on stage for “All Day” at the BRITs, which drew the world’s attention to the scene in a major way. Just days later, he dropped “Shutdown”, which would become one of grime’s most recognisable anthems. It sampled a Drake Vine and offered a witty response to criticism of Kanye’s mobbed-out BRITs performance, going on to win Best Song at the 2015 MOBO Awards. Throughout both years, tracksuits were his uniform, whether all black or all white (as in “Shutdown”). That authenticity and understated sense of style earned him a place on GQ’s 50 Best-Dressed Men list in 2015 and paved the way for Konnichiwa.
Signature items: Independent brands
In 2016, Skepta almost single-handedly took grime global. Konnichiwa, his fourth studio album, arrived in May, debuting at No. 2 on the UK charts and charting in a host of other countries, including the States and Australia. In September, it won the Hyundai Mercury Prize, beating industry favourites like David Bowie and Radiohead, becoming the first grime album to win since Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner in 2003. He collected the award in a black tracksuit while his crew wore all white, reversing the colour dynamic of the “Shutdown” video. The tracksuits themselves had evolved too: he’d begun wearing independent labels like Cottweiler and Astrid Andersen, while his own brand, MAINS, was already in the works.
Signature items: SK Airs, MAINS boxers
Skepta finally launched his own label, MAINS, in 2017. With tracksuits and everyday wear at its core, it was designed to reflect British youth culture. He premiered it on the cover of British GQ alongside Naomi Campbell, both clad in nothing but MAINS boxers, which swiftly became the brand’s most sought-after piece. That year also brought his first Nike collab, the Air Max 97 Ultra, though the Craig Green Moncler two-piece he wore to its launch kinda overshadowed the creps. By now, he had finally dug the designer labels out of the bin, spending time with the likes of Virgil Abloh and Daniel Lee and turning up, respectfully, to their Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta shows. It was during this period that he became a fashion darling, setting him on the path to becoming the style icon he’s considered today, straddling the line between the streets and high fashion.
Signature items: Well-tailored suits, a cigar, a Rolls-Royce
The turn of the decade marked a real transitional period. Approaching his late thirties, Skepta seemingly decided it was time to mature a little. After dropping his collaborative album with Chip and Young Adz, Insomnia, he released the All In EP in 2021 and even wore a tuxedo to its release party. The music video for “Eyes On Me” finds him riding in Rolls-Royces, modelling for Bottega Veneta and buying cigars, all in a sharply tailored suit that’s a world away from the one in “Rolex Sweep”. By this point, MAINS was on hiatus, and his final Nike collab arrived in mid-2021, before he signed with Puma in late 2022. He also picked up DJing again and co-curated a Sotheby’s exhibition featuring his own paintings alongside works by contemporaries like Slawn and Goldie.
Signature items: MAINS head-to-toe, a pair of SK Puma SKopes
In 2023, Skepta launched the house music label Más Tiempo with BBK co-member Jammer and spent much of the year DJing around the world. He also found time to release his directorial debut, Tribal Mark, and revive MAINS with a major show at London Fashion Week. Moving beyond the youth focus of the original brand, its first post-hiatus collection blended American sportswear heritage, à la Ralph Lauren, with craftsmanship and tailoring, with Jme and A$AP Nast modelling. For much of these two years, MAINS was his uniform, whether the (track)suit he wore to the Fashion Awards or the triple-denim look (matching cap to boot) he sported at Formula 1. He made his Met Gala debut the same year, dressed head-to-toe in Daniel Lee’s blue and black Burberry duck print.
Signature items: Fork & Knife chain, Corteiz collaboration, neon Stone Island jacket
The last two years have marked a creative rebirth for Skepta. On Friday, he releases The Fork & Knife, with guests ranging from Madness’ Suggs to Asake and plenty more in between. He’s teamed up with Corteiz on a run of archive-referencing clothing, nodding to the now-revered Lake Elsinore hat, Konnichiwa and the infamous SBTV Halloween freestyle. In summer 2025, he took to the stage for an impromptu Glastonbury set in his own Corteiz collaboration, and it went down as perhaps the best of the whole festival. This year, he repeated the trick at Reading and Leeds, wearing a neon green Stone Island jacket that broke the internet.
MAINS and the Puma collaborations continue, and he’s even covered GQ for a second time—topless again, of course. In 2014, Skepta binned a wardrobe because it wasn’t him. Twelve years on, he’s turning his own history into clothes, embracing the looks and moments he once left behind. He’s no longer running from who he was; he’s wearing it loud and proud, even spinning a tech-house remix of “Sunglasses At Night” in his DJ sets. The restraint that made him is still in there somewhere, just under a neon green Stone Island jacket. On Friday, we find out how the new era sounds.
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