1:30 p.m., King’s Cross district, a stone’s throw from Saint Pancras station. The sky is heavy, saturated with clouds, and London is already plunged into darkness. Hussein Chalayan arrives at the meeting dressed all in black, white sneakers on his feet, with a discreet appearance but a piercing gaze. He spots us at the other end of the café and greets us from afar with a warm gesture. The designer occupies a special place.
He has not only marked the fashion history of the last thirty years. Its cultural imprint has also gone far beyond the strict limits of clothing to embrace sculpture, video, furniture design, and simply art. But Hussein Chalayan is considerate and accessible. He asks about us by the time his cappuccino arrives. “You are more of a fashion person or a culture journalist? ” ” A bit of both, dare we. Fashion is part of culture, right? » There he seems, reassured.
The designer prefers a discussion to a formal interview, he will often invite us during the interview to dialogue with him, returning questions to us: ” And you what do you think ? » From ChatGPT to the disorders of the world, through digital solitude and the luxury that has “swallowed” fashion, Hussein Chalayan has a lot to say. His words are those of a free creator who has always placed the refusal of compromise at the heart of his practice. And his work, today exhibited in the four corners of the world, is unclassifiable.
Buried silk dresses
Of Cypriot origin, born in Nicosia in 1970, sent to boarding school in London at the age of 8, Hussein Chalayan graduated in 1993 from the Central Saint Martins school of art and design. His collections, largely biographical, refer to his personal and family history, made up of exoduses and uprootings, evoke questions linked to religions, war, new technologies, and relationships between the West and the East. “His commitment to major social issues is never there to denounce, but rather offers a spiritual quest capable, one day perhaps, of changing the path of the world,” can we read in his monograph (under the direction of Robert Violette, Hussein Chalayan, Rizzoli, 2011).
Thirty years ago, the collection he designed for his diploma, entitled The Tangent Flows (1993), already explored duality. That of mind and matter, based on research on the work of the mathematician Isaac Newton, the philosopher René Descartes and the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. He thus composed a series of silk dresses which he buried in a garden, in contact with iron particles, for a few weeks. The dresses are exhumed and presented as they are, transformed by the oxidation and alteration of the fabrics.
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