The name is the argument. Look up "saga boy" and you will find a wayward man: a dandy, a womaniser, a man of no fixed purpose. Cooper recently met a lawyer who said exactly that. He asked him whether he believed it, or whether he had simply read it. "Your point of view cannot be what you read," he told him.

The Saga Boys, and the Saga Gals beside them, were a subculture that emerged in Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s: young men and women "who decided to dress the way they wanted to dress, sing the way they wanted to sing, dance the way they wanted to dance," Cooper says, "not based on what was prescribed by the colonial structure." The colonial press called that waywardness. The definition stuck.

"Because we understand media, we understand PR, we understand how communications and marketing works," he says. "The truth is most of what we see has been curated with an agenda in mind."

Cooper did not set out to start a label. He spent years in other people’s rooms, at the Evening Standard and on fashion titles, interviewing creative directors and handing his best ideas to brands that then made them their own. "I realised there was a hill building of ideas that were not meant for somebody else to bring to the world."

Covid made the decision for him. He came home on what he calls the fashion train from Paris, fell ill, and was left with brain fog that erased dates, details and whole conversations. The panic attacks came quietly, then all at once, on a stalled Tube train between stations. "That was the moment I decided to find a therapist." It became a year and a half of sessions, sometimes twice a week.

Harris knows the territory. He tells Cooper about the flight to Berlin he walked off before take-off, and the years it took to fly again. Cooper still uses box breathing in the air. His new anxiety, he says with a laugh, is not getting enough done. He is learning, from Brené Brown and from athletes, that recovery is part of the work.

Every piece of Sagaboi crochet is made by hand by women crocheters in Trinidad and Tobago. Much of the sewn clothing is made in the Caribbean too, although the label now also produces in Italy, Portugal, India and London. That is less a strategy than a necessity: sending one shirt out of Trinidad can cost more than a hundred and fifty US dollars, and parcels for a show can take five weeks to arrive. "You wonder why you don’t see many Caribbean brands on the international runways," he says. "The infrastructure’s not there."

The shows happen anyway: five, and a presentation, which is a great deal for an emerging label. One was staged with the Museum of London, in a building that once stored rum shipped from the Caribbean. The latest, in Milan, traced the Merikins, the formerly enslaved African Americans who fought for Britain in the War of 1812 and were given land in Moruga. Cooper is descended from one of them. "If I didn’t do this work, I would not even know that this is my heritage."

Harris, who is part Portuguese and part African, recognises the gap in the record. Brazil, he says, has become fashionable with campaigns that know nothing about it.

Cooper has covered London menswear since it was London Collections: Men, more than a decade ago. Today, he says, there is no scheme that fits a label like his, and no dedicated men’s fashion week to show in. "There needs to be a position called the chief of support at the fashion councils," he says, only half joking. Even graduates of the country’s best fashion schools, he adds, are struggling.

What would surprise people? That he trained in accounting and finance, and worked at Goldman Sachs and PwC while moonlighting as a fashion writer in New York, sneaking into the tents at Bryant Park after work. His first show was Narciso Rodriguez. A health scare, later disproved, settled the rest. "If I’m gonna die in six months, I’m not gonna die doing something I don’t love."

What does he hope the work leaves behind? The confidence, he says, to look at the past differently: to ask where you come from, and to accept that what was handed down as gospel "may just be propaganda to serve the power structure of the day."