Patu means duck in Papiamentu. The Papiamento word for shoe is sapatu. Most people only need that explained once before the collection makes sense.
The story is small, the way the best stories are. As a kid, every time I got a new pair of shoes I would run to my great-grandmother to show them off. I'd hold them up, beaming, and shout "Patu!" instead of "Sapatu!". One missing syllable. She'd smile every single time.
One word that became a family joke
That mix-up never went away. It became a thing. Years later, decades later, the family would still bring it up. Me as a small boy, holding shoes I was way too proud of, calling them ducks. The kind of joke that's only funny to the people who were there, which is exactly what makes it worth keeping.
When I started designing the Patu collection, I wasn't trying to recreate the moment. I was trying to bottle the feeling around it: the innocence of being a kid who had no filter between excitement and the world, the warmth of a great-grandmother who let you be ridiculous, the way a tiny mistake can become a family heirloom.
Why this collection matters to me
A lot of streetwear is loud about influences that don't actually belong to the designer. Patu is the opposite of that. It's loud about something that only matters to me, and to the small handful of people who were in that house when I came running in.
That's also why I'm OK with people not getting it at first. If you wear Patu IV or Patu VI and someone asks "what does it mean," good. That's the design doing its job. A small bridge to a story you can choose to share.
The pieces
The Patu line has grown into a full series: Patu, Patu II, III, IV, V, and VI. Each one a slightly different way of looking at the same memory. Different colourways, different print weights, but the heart is the same.
If one of them speaks to you, that's enough. The collection lives at /shop/patu.
What I hope you take from it
You don't need to grow up bilingual to relate to this. Everyone has a moment they got something slightly wrong as a kid, and someone they loved laughed in the warmest possible way. Patu is for that moment. Whichever language it happens in.
