London design studio YY is using an enquiring mindset to carve a new path

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson is often credited with saying, ‘It’s not the destination, it’s the journey’. It’s an ethos embraced by YY, the London-based multidisciplinary studio led by Tawanda Chiweshe and Francisco Gaspar, who are ready to prove, with humour and wisdom, that a design journey is, in fact, all about the ride.

Meet YY: an interview with Tawanda Chiweshe and Francisco Gaspar

‘A lot of what we do is ask questions and discuss open-ended ideas as a means of communicating to people that things don’t necessarily have to be final for them to exist,’ says Chiweshe. He’s talking from the studio’s HQ at 180 The Strand, where he is surrounded by examples of their work.

An oversized, blue plastic chair, inspired by the ‘K67’ modular kiosk (designed in 1966 by Slovenian architect Saša Mächtig) and inset with thick black cushions, is both inviting and overwhelming. It was presented in 2024 at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan as part of a Nike installation (to launch its ‘Alphafly 3’ sneaker). The ‘AA67’ bookshelf speaker, borne of the same inspiration, was put into production with Caliper. There’s also a prototype for an angular metal chair in fluorescent green, to be presented in Paris later this spring, while T-shirts hang from the ceiling, and sneakers are stacked on shelves.

All around is paraphernalia from past collaborations – with the likes of Ikea, Cassina, Alessi, Vitra, Braun and Mercedes-Maybach – revealing the prolific creative studio’s reach. The designers met at Alaska Alaska, the studio founded in 2017 by Virgil Abloh, and led by Chiweshe and Gaspar since Abloh’s untimely passing in 2021. YY marks a new path: the pair are emerging discreetly from the shadows, ready to make their own point of view known.

‘In 2024, we started writing a lot, synthesising, reconciling all of our past experiences, and really underscoring our own interests in order to have the conviction to move forward. And we’re in a position now where we know what we want to say,’ says Gaspar. ‘YY is about encapsulating everything we’ve learned so far, while also pushing people to think beyond this trap of the perfect thing,’ adds Chiweshe.

In the YY playbook, experimentation is paramount, with the bad ideas as valuable as the good, all equal parts of an exercise in finding the purest intention and expression. Research and exchange are the foundation of this practice, which is intentionally hard to define: a resistance movement against easy classification, against convention, and an embrace of in-progressness. In a rather rigid industry, YY asks if we can appreciate indeterminacy and learn to accept, maybe even mildly enjoy, the discomfort of confusion. Can we learn to let go a little? They ask ‘why?’ as often they ask ‘why not?’ (hence the studio’s name). ‘We don’t need to overexplain things to legitimise them or to make things conceptually interesting,’ says Gaspard. ‘People either like something or they don’t. None of it is that deep.’

Their exhibition, ‘AAAAYY: Same Same But Different’, which is on show at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) until 21 March 2026, serves as an introduction to their universe, where prototyping, collaboration and conversation take centre stage, and objects, in various stages of completion, are seen as a natural side effect of these primary practices rather than a singular end goal.

‘YY confronts both the armature and the incidental aspects of everyday life in a very surprising way,’ says AA director Ingrid Schroder. ‘They do this with a looseness that I think flies in the face of conventional, and perhaps more uptight, ideas of what design is. Sometimes, with architecture, we feel that the complete and the precise is what makes good design. I think they’ve just been incredibly rapid in the reconfiguration of that as a design ideal. Theirs is an interesting reflection of the kind of uncertainty of the time we live in. It’s far more resilient, flexible and adaptable.’

Chiweshe and Gaspar first met in 2016 while working at Cos in Knightsbridge, London. Chiweshe, who was born in Zimbabwe but grew up in Hertfordshire, was studying product design at Central Saint Martins, while Gaspar had moved to London from his native Portugal to study graphic design at the London College of Communication. An early fan of Abloh’s vision and unparalleled ability to draw from all cultural categories, Chiweshe hazarded a guess at his dream mentor’s email address and shared his portfolio. To his surprise, a sporadic dialogue started, with Abloh eventually reaching out to say he had a new client and wanted to bring Chiweshe on board: the client was Ikea, and the resulting ‘Markerad’ collection was released to much fanfare in 2019. Gaspar joined the studio first as a freelancer, then full-time in late 2018, as an integral member of a two-person core team.

What followed was a creative collaboration that allowed the two young designers unfettered access to some of the biggest brands in the world. ‘We churned out ideas, we learned to let go of ego, and we benefitted enormously from Virgil’s generosity, understanding that there is an alternative way to run a studio. The context was super-generous, super-kind. That allowed us to be enormously productive,’ says Gaspar.

‘And now there’s an opportunity for us to provide a new metric, or a new validation system,’ adds Chiweshe. ‘Because we’ve seen what is needed for you to succeed and, again, it’s not that difficult: it comes from yourself, from sincerity, generosity, integrity, from being true to what you believe in. Things are pretty dark right now, but we are moving forward, still trying to go against the grain, attempting to carve out roads less travelled in the context of design – and I think there’s a fundamental baseline of optimism that’s required to embark on that journey.’

This spring will see the release of YY’s first design under the new moniker, a door handle for London-based manufacturer Izé, inspired by anti-skate fittings (metal studs or strips installed in urban environments to discourage skateboarding), which they reimagined as points of access rather than restriction.

‘This object represents us very well, or distils what we do, in terms of flipping preconceived ideas on their head,’ says Gaspar. That their first release as YY is a mechanism for opening doors, an artefact rife with metaphor, seems fitting. ‘We are in the process of opening a new door, perhaps closing another, and we have thought a lot about the doors we were able to pass through, both on a creative and human level,’ says Chiweshe. ‘In this next phase, we might also be able to hold it open for others.’