Jeffrey Ampratwum is a creative director, stylist, and educator specializing in menswear. In his own words, he is “the guy who will dance at all your parties, and drink all of your champagne.” Having gotten to know him, the description fits. But it undersells him. Outside of his obligations as life of the party, Jeffrey is dutifully committed to his work. He is passionate, admirably so, and he approaches styling with a respect and ingenuity that is rare in an era of trend-mania and throwaway fashion.
I cannot define his personal style, something I suspect he will be pleased to hear. His outfits are spirited but always smart, influenced by tradition but never predictable. He has trademarks (“some people know me as Babushka Boy”) and clear influences (“Renaissance art, Parisian art deco, and contemporary New York”), and still a single descriptor eludes me. Eventually I realize why: a Jeffrey ensemble is far more than the clothes. The context an outfit is seen in matters as much as the garments. One must set the stage. “The surroundings, the look, the delivery, the conversation. For me, that is style.”
Raised in New York
Jeffrey dials in from a park bench in the middle of his city, unfazed by the traffic, the onlookers, and an inquisitive dog that joins us mid-call. A true New Yorker. New York is the city that raised him, and the one that keeps inspiring him. “I’m sitting here in my birthplace, actually, the Bronx. There is an extremely creative atmosphere.” The Bronx is also the birthplace of hip-hop, and Jeffrey grew up in step with the movement, his childhood soundtracked by new funk-inspired beats. “We wanted to emulate what we saw. During our downtime it was basketball or hip-hop. This is before we had phones. We were forced to come outside and do things.”
The biggest influence, though, came from closer to home: his mother. She took pride in her appearance, and as a single parent she still found the time to make an effort. Watching her morning routine, Jeffrey realized the ritual was about more than hygiene or habit. She was creating a look, and it mattered to her. “I knew that when my mother put on certain things, it made her feel better. I think that’s where my first love for dressing women came from.”
“I was melting into this creative being, but I didn’t necessarily know it,” he reflects. “As I started high school, I began to express my creativity in my wardrobe, and by drawing on things.” Even so, a creative career never felt like an option. “Being from West Africa, Ghana specifically, you’re not encouraged to go into the arts. It’s either you’re going to be a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer, or just go back into the womb.” His compromise was dentistry. “I’m left-handed, but I think with the right side of my brain. I coordinate well. I’m artistic. I can draw. I love a great smile. It made sense.” He packed his bags for dental school in Tennessee.
Paris, and proof
Jeffrey never lost his love of a great smile, but the dentistry career was short. He returned to New York, worked at a non-profit for three years, and then decided that “the American passport is a thing of luxury” and that it was time to use it. To choose a destination, he looked to his roots. “I’m nostalgic. I love my past, and I have always loved vintage. I wanted to feel like I was living back in the ’80s.” He settled on Paris.
Where many find Paris a letdown, Jeffrey found the opposite. “The imagination of Paris made me feel like I was living another life, or a life I had lived before. Paris is very different after dark. The characters come out when the sun goes down. You get the great and the raw of Paris.” Almost the moment he landed, he slid into the DMs of an art curator and built a partnership that let him find his feet, styling, art-directing, and production-managing an editorial shoot outside the Louvre. When I note that most people only aspire to that kind of nerve, he does not indulge the praise. “My attitude has always been, I’m gonna get up and go do it.”
Paris was only the start. He worked his way into the fashion scenes of Stockholm and then London, and remembers his travels by the outfits that defined them. Fashion became a way to document the people he met. He tells me about a collection of lace dresses that became a traveling canvas: he dressed models across Europe in the same dresses, then painted each person’s story onto the fabric in red wine and acrylic. Each dress a record of a life he had crossed. “It was a confirmation of my ode to fashion. I realized I was good at what I was attempting to do, and people appreciated it.” He points to that experiment as the moment he became a creative director. It was not an easy passage. “You can’t be a poser in the arts. The French are tough. When you come in from the outside saying you’re an artist, they say, prove it.” He proved it.
The student becomes the teacher
Jeffrey came home with a new self-belief and a direction. He enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology, completed a styling program, and set up a mentoring scheme for younger students along the way. “I made it cool to be smart, cool to get all As, and I offered a new perspective on how to obtain information.” That enthusiasm, plus his command of the subject, carried him to the role of lead educator on the menswear program at FIT, a job he holds with real pride. “I’m probably one of the best in the menswear teaching space, in the way I teach it.”
His measure of success is not the A-to-F grade. He sees the course, and fashion generally, as a vehicle for young people to find their calling. “We all have some innate creativity. My job is to help students tap into it and find where they excel. I have students now in PR, design, hair and makeup, nothing to do with styling at all.” His own hard road makes him determined that others not walk in blind. “Most of the time we go to school and come out doing something totally different. It’s important that they know they have options, that they enter the industry with accurate expectations.”
His syllabus is rooted in history. “I go through the whole history of menswear. My dad’s generation would never go to a dinner without a jacket. Inheriting a generational hand-me-down is a great honor. Not only are these quality pieces, they tell a story.” His favorite exercise makes the point playfully: a pile of random garments on a table, three minutes for students to build “the key look.” After they present, he tells them none of them made the grade, then shows the look he would have built. His favorite part is the flurry of objections that follows. “Fashion is subjective. I often leave the classroom thinking, you know what, that person was kind of right.” His students keep him current, too. “They use Pinterest and TikTok more and more. I can’t keep leaning on PDFs and PowerPoints and become outdated. I welcome new technologies from them. It helps us all grow.”
Building a brand
Jeffrey is always chasing the new approach, and he is channeling it into a company of his own. He is the co-founder of the luxury goods brand KenJeffreys, born from an old friendship. “A buddy from college and I both vowed to become dentists. He saw it through, I didn’t. But we stayed friends. He’s Kenny, I’m Jeffrey. KenJeffreys.” The brand is built on the experience of travel, informed by his own early years crossing Europe. The range now runs to a unisex fragrance, bespoke shoes for men and women, and handbags, all made to order in line with his commitment to sustainable practice.
He built it around a feeling, not a product. “The act of arriving at the airport and settling into your business-class seat, what does that feel like? When you get to the hotel, what is the fragrance? Foggy bathroom mirrors wiped with a fresh cotton towel. Those are the moments we want to capture. That, for us, is a luxury travel brand.” The through-line is the same one that has guided him all along. “We want to look good and smell good, because if you do, you feel good, and then you perform well.”
Put on your best shoes
Which brings him to a fight he is picking with the culture. Many emerged from the pandemic happy to live in sweatpants, and Jeffrey is not a fan. “There’s been a shift. Some are using working from home as an excuse not to get dressed up.” Flip-flops at cocktail bars, sports shorts in jazz clubs. He blames a loss of understanding rather than laziness. “Some men are using it as an excuse, not knowing how to dress for an occasion versus not knowing how to dress at all.” His answer was a menswear guide, a how-to for dressing in a metropolis, that enforces exactly one rule: enjoy it. “The most important questions: is it fun? Is it enjoyable?”
What he teaches is less about matching a tie to a blazer than about attitude. Choosing what you wear signals a willingness to make an effort, for yourself and for the people you meet, and it opens doors. “Whether we like it or not, people judge you on your appearance.” As a society we spend a lot of energy denying that, and in doing so, he worries, we leave young people ill-equipped. He refuses to let dress become one more barrier for men from his old neighborhood. “I look back and think, I’m from the Bronx, how does this even work?” So he and Ken take the KenJeffreys experience into colleges across the US: style assessments, dressing-for-work tutorials, grooming lessons, and, a nod to his old career, a dental screening. “You can’t be dressed sharp and looking great but chatting with food in your teeth.”
After an hour with Jeffrey I am left with a renewed pride in my appearance and a real reluctance to slip back into my hoodie. I ask the tired but revealing question: does fashion change lives? He smiles, nods, and starts with himself. “Fashion gives me the energy to create and the space to do it. It gives you the capacity to leave a mark, a legacy, something that continues to give. When your passion and your purpose marry, you’ve satisfied your hunger. That’s where I am now, and it’s what I’m building for my students.”
Jeffrey Ampratwum is at jeffreyampratwum.com and @jeffreyampratwum.
