L’ENCHANTEUR Dynasty and Soull Ogun bring forth spiritual healing with their powerful designs

L’ENCHANTEUR

Dynasty and Soull Ogun bring forth spiritual healing with their powerful designs

Words MAHORO SEWARD Photography OLGA DE LA IGLESIA

Whether it’s Romulus and Remus or Osiris and Isis, twins have been endowed with paranormal significance in almost every culture, received either as a boon or a bane. In Yoruba spirituality, they are a blessing — a harbinger of lives to be lived beneath the watchful eye of the otherwise vengeful Orisha Shango, among the most feared deities in the pantheon. Such is the belief in their closeness to God that human twins are themselves deemed the incarnation of divine twins Orisha Ibeji, bearers of joy and happiness. And so, 5,000 miles away from the land of their paternal ancestors, Brooklyn-born Dynasty and Soull Ogun, joint founders of label L’Enchanteur, have been working to carry forth the mystical endowment of their bloodline since early 2014, forging a fashion practice that darns threads of plural histories, traditions and sciences of holistic spirituality through the fabric of the city they’ve always known as home. Along the way they’ve amassed a loyal fanbase, counting no small number of the most influential creative forces of their time among them: Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg can be seen donning the brand’s trademark chunky, precious metal rings on Instagram, and the twins recently worked on a collaboration with Solange Knowles’ creative agency, Saint Heron.

Best translated as ‘The Enchanter’, L’Enchanteur describe themselves as a ‘creative incubator’, a laboratory in which the maligned visual leitmotifs of urban blackness undergo alchemical processes: the ridges of a box braid are cast in gold plate for a ring; du-rags are woven in velvets and silks. But far from being some Dapper Dan x Gucci-esque repotting of ‘the hood’ in the high-end, L’Enchanteur’s roots stretch far deeper, drawing upon pools as far-ranging as numerology, tantra, colour theory and New York City itself.

“We tap into certain sounds and vibrations of the city’s unique symphony. It’s what allows us our raw approach to luxury,” Dynasty tells me. Indeed, the precarious criss-crossing of personal melodies, the haphazard clashes and chords that ring out at the daily intersections of some 8.7 million lives in New York, furnish the duo with an endless resource of raw material to select from. But unlike many other cities of its size, it’s the endlessly varied ethnic topography of New York, the many-fold tendrils of identity that enmesh beneath the city’s neatly gridded streets, that offer them the most in the way of inspiration. As Soull explains: “I know it sounds cliché, but growing up in Brooklyn, we really experienced the full extent of New York’s melting pot. Each neighbourhood has its own flavour.”

District-born identities can be seen from Flatbush, the neighbourhood in which the twins were raised by their Yoruba father and Dominican mother, brimming with bold Caribbean flair, to the Hispanic inflections of Sunset Park, to the cheap, argon Cyrillic that fronts

“We tap into certain sounds and vibrations of the city’s unique symphony. It’s what allows us our raw approach to luxury”

stores in Brighton Beach. The ubiquitous Brooklyn silhouette born of this macromelee — baseball caps, oversized tees and shirts, loose fit trousers slung low — features prominently in the twins’ ready-to-wear; but it’s through their chosen palette of hues and fabrics that the sisters pay homage to their own experiences. The garments may be “very Brooklyn,” Soull admits, “but the fabrics that we use hail from our heritages, and honour the things we were surrounded by growing up in our household. You can see West African embroidery details, and florals, which really speak to our Caribbean side. It appeals to a lot of people here in Brooklyn too; so many people have similar blended heritages.”

The most immediately eye-catching aspect of their work is its colour, with garments and jewellery available across a rainbow-like spectrum of tones, each near-photographic in its saturation. But the value and consideration invested in the choosing of a colour, a stone, even a style of stitching, far surpasses mere aesthetics. Well versed in the teachings of tantra, Dynasty and Soull anchor their practice in spiritual healing. “Our work is a service that we’re providing to people. There are certain levels to it. There’s of course the level of business, where we’re producing and selling goods. But there’s also a level where we’re providing healing through specific colours and materials. It comes from our own experiences and personal research of healing, and from trying to help others through similar situations,” explains Dynasty.

“We research things like chakras, which pertain to certain colours. Often we’ll opt for a colour because we want to put something specific out into the world,” continues Soull. She recalls episodes on the subway that seem to support a belief in a common energy that actualises through fashion, even if unconsciously: “It’s funny, sometimes on the train I’ll notice that I’m wearing a weird blue or green perhaps,” she says. “And I’ll see so many people wearing that exact shade that same day. And it’s not always fashion-y people, it’s just people going to work in a restaurant, in a cubicle or wherever. It proves that we’re all somehow connected.”

A similar creative process is adopted in the production of the brand’s jewellery, spanning inscribed amulets, ‘Midas Touch’ finger caps, and substantial precious metal bands and rings. Harnessing the energetic qualities of specific metals, gemstones and crystals, each piece is intended as much as a healing tool as it is a beautiful object. Take the malachite medallions, for example, carved for signet rings: it has stunning visual impact, it’s cool, spearmint-green set within 14-carat gold. But it’s on account of the deeply cleansing, transformational potential of the stone that it has been chosen, resulting in a product that introduces a grain of spirituality to the balancing of function and form.

Fashion may be an industry hardly known for its support of holistic self-care, but the twins, two queer black women, hold the belief that there are few better positions from which to rally against oppressive walls than from within.

There is also the issue of fashion’s embarrassingly unsustainable product cycle, reliant on manufacturing desire for new objects, rather than producing ones to be cherished.

As an antidote, the twins seek to reappraise the value of heirlooms, with Soull noting that “in our cultural niche, we rarely speak about heirlooms, or about things we want to hand down to our child or grandchild. It’s not that we don’t have those things, but they’re just rarely spoken of.” Enter the brand’s runaway success: the humble du-rag. “It summarises exactly what we’ve been talking about. Du-rags embody this mentality that our lives are disposable, and that made me want to design them even more,” professes Dynasty. Long available in throwaway packs of twos and threes for a couple of dollars a pop, the headwrap so readily associated with the black man in urban America is marked, at the very instance of purchase, by its destiny to be thrown away. Recognising the perversity of having such a key motif of urban black identity so intertwined with how easily it’s discarded, the sisters set out to recast the rag as an item worthy of care, pride and preservation: something you’d rest well to know that it might one day be worn by your grandkids. What’s more, cut from the richest of velvets, silks and

denims, adorned with crystals and floral embroidery, a piece once deemed ill-suited to ‘polite company’ is promoted to the level of the silk tie: “We’re trying to elevate the du-rag to something you can take pride in. Joe Bloggs might walk into the office with his tie on, but this is our tie, this is our suit!,” exclaims Soull. “For too long we’ve been what Fifth Avenue’s getting inspiration from. We know that we’re on everybody’s moodboards, that there are pictures in boardrooms where they’re trying to recreate our proposition of what luxury is. But the new luxury is attainability, it’s feeling like you’re being invited in, rather than kept out,” she continues.

As such, the pair readily affiliate themselves with the new generation of New York creatives of colour — among them brands such as Telfar, Pyer Moss, and Gypsy Sport — that are rebalancing the premium fashion market through narratives of radical inclusivity and heightened visibility. But yet more crucial is L’Enchanteur’s adamant rejection of the idea that they are creating value in Brooklyn-native culture. The borough’s rhizomatic communities of which Dynasty and Soull are inextricable products, have always carried wealth in their roots — and as those roots further entangle, that wealth only grows. L’Enchanteur doesn’t “add value to the culture — it’s already here. What we’re doing is guaranteeing that it’s getting seen and preserved.”