Hussein Chalayan

I went to the Hussein Chalayan talk at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Tuesday and I found it incredibly interested and I found I really like chalayan as a person but I did find the journalist incredible weird asking about his personal life.

Chalayan spoke about how he felt about his journey and said he has been on an adventure but has always felt like an “outsider” because he is originally from Cyprus but now sees himself as a “Londoner”. He was drawn to London because its multi culcutral and he feels he is made of bits of everywhere as is London.

He feels that fashion is a medium to explore the world, for example he finds it a catalyst for understanding the world. He see’s himself as a communicator or ideas and hates being put in a box of conceptual. He feels the labels reduce him to one thing. He is an “ideas person” but that doesn’t make him conceptual. He approaches fashion as a world science, looks at different disciplines, such as body language.

He spoke about the business side of fashion and said how determined he was to make it work and he feels lucky to be so enthusiastic and a perfectionist. But found the financial side the hardest. But it helped that him and McQueen filled a gap in the market and people took more risks which we don’t do anymore. He feels that “consumer culture was not so involved” and “digital media has changed this” as well as “celebrity culture”.

The talk finished with questions from the audience which were quite interesting but I did feel they just reiterated what the journalist had said and other questions were just stupid. He finished with speaking about what inspired him and this included anthropology, history, body as a cultural thing, movement and transformation, cultural experience, beauty, and the fact that ‘ideas create the form”.