eith Henning and Jody
Paulsen are in for a long
night. It’s the Friday before
the Tuesday on which
they will be showing their
new AKJP collection at
SA Fashion Week. They’re
shooting the Permanent
Collection campaign
tomorrow – and the clothes
aren’t ready. And yet, the
design duo is anything but
frazzled: Keith is eager to
break in a newly purchased
machine that irons prints on
is preoccupied with deadlines for
an imminent exhibition in Miami.
It’s time to stop thinking of AKJP as an ‘up-and-coming’
local design brand. It is established: you’d be hard-pressed
to name a contemporary with a store separate from
its design studio, a head designer separate from its
founders, a PR office (also separate), and clothes sold in
both boutique and department-store environments. Not
to mention an undisputed it-factor and positive growth
trajectory. In an industry where little comes easy and the
odds are almost never in your favour, this is impressive.
Keith devised Adriaan Kuiters, named after his well-
travelled grandfather, in 2011. His background in
industrial design, paired with a spirit of travel, gave birth
to a collection of bags. Sensing a gap in the market for
well-tailored menswear basics, he added shirts and shorts
to the line-up. Keith was right about the market, if slightly
unprepared when it came to designing garments: ‘I just
jumped into the deep end and learned on my way up,’ he
says, giving a great deal of credit to a pattern maker he
met in Woodstock. ‘Ridah Sadan; he’s amazing – he was
like a mentor. He told me you must do this like this and
you must go fi nd that there.’ Ridah still produces pieces
for AKJP today.
Jody was approaching the end of an MA degree
at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art when he fi rst
collaborated with Keith. ‘You hear the worst stories
of people who end up doing something completely
unrelated [to fi ne art],’ he says, which motivated him to
expand his skills beyond his specialisation in print media.
What started as Keith’s collaboration with Jody during
the great print boom of 2013 turned into a rebrand – the
birth of AKJP.
Keith and Jody’s roles are anything but rigid. ‘Jody
takes control of the print, defi nitely, but he is involved
in the design side a lot too,’ says Keith, who sees to the
business side of things.
‘When everything started growing, Keith couldn’t be in
the studio all the time,’ says Jody. ‘I kind of make art and
stuff, so I’m always in studio. It’s easy for me to design for
Keith because there was such a strong sense of identity
there already.’ Still, ‘Keith has to in some way have the
fi nal say, even though it’s a joint thing... Because it was
his to begin with.’JAN/FEB 2018 MARIECLAIRE.CO.ZA 89
Keith Henning (left)
and Jody Paulsen
fashion insider