Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan (Hüseyin Çağlayan), 2006

Dresses by Hussein Chalayan in the Design Museum London, 2009

Hussein Chalayan ( Turkish: Hüseyin Çağlayan), MBE (* 1970 in Nicosia , Cyprus ) is a British fashion designer of Turkish-Cypriot origin, entrepreneur and concept artist . Chalayan is widely regarded as an extremely creative fashion designer with intellectual aspirations and a penchant for the avant-garde .

Life

The son of Turkish Cypriot parents initially grew up in Cyprus, but moved to England with his family in 1978 and has lived in London since 1982 . Chalayan completed a design degree at London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 1993 and, after an internship at the Savile Row tailor Timothy Everest, founded Cartesia Ltd. in 1994 . his own fashion company in London. Silk clothes of his thesis at Saint Martins College, called “The Tangent Flows”, were riddled with metal shavings and buried in the earth for a few months in a ritual ceremony to demonstrate the decomposition process. The London upscale department store Browns then exhibited parts of this collection in its shop windows. In 1995, Chalayan won a competition sponsored by vodka maker Absolut Vodka , the prize money was around £ 30,000. From 1995 onwards, Chalayan was able to present his fashion at London Fashion Week . The singer Björk wears a white Chalayan jacket made of paper-like material on the cover of her album Post (Album) (1995) and modeled for the designer at one of his first fashion shows in 1995.

Chalayan's completely unconventional, very experimental artistic production convinced the experts from the art scene and from the fashion industry alike, so that he was booked for several international exhibitions in museums and two years in a row, in 1999 and 2000, the title of Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards got awarded. His fashion shows, for which Chalayan is inspired by the world of art, politics, architecture, contemporary history or nature, were shaped from the beginning by his intellectual demands and sometimes resembled conceptual performances. In 1998, alluding to Islam , he showed female models in his catwalk show , who appeared on the catwalk , from fully veiled in a chador , to appearing with a veiled upper body and naked lower body, to, except for a face veil, completely naked on the catwalk. In 2000, at the end of one of his fashion shows, a model climbed into a coffee table and donned it as a telescopic tube skirt. In 2001 he showed a collapsible origami dress under the name Airmail Dress . In 2007 Chalayan presented a bubble dress made of transparent plastic balls and, in collaboration with Fiona Swarovski, LED dresses, on the surface of which a short film was played. In 2008 he presented clothes that emitted red laser beams.

There were collaborations with Topshop in the late 1990s and with Marks & Spencer in the early 2000s . In 1998 the New York cashmere specialist TSE engaged Chalayan as a design consultant. His contract expired in 2001. Due to production difficulties and high debt, Chalayan's fashion company Cartesia Ltd. 2001 bankruptcy. A deal about a stake in his company by the then Gucci group had previously failed. He then launched a new company under his own name as Hussein Chalayan LLP and signed a contract with the Italian textile manufacturer Gibó for the production of his women's fashion. In the same year the London jeweler hired Asprey Chalayan as creative director for a new Asprey clothing line. Chalayan left Asprey in 2004; the fashion division of the house was discontinued.

In 2002 Chalayan relocated the presentation of his fashion shows to Paris for Paris Fashion Week . In the same year, he brought out his first men's fashion collection together with Gibó , which was temporarily discontinued in 2006 and only relaunched in 2014. In April 2004, a Chalayan flagship store opened in Tokyo . On June 17, 2006 Chalayan was accepted as a member of the Order of the British Empire for his services to the British fashion industry . In 2007 Chalayan granted the rights for its men's fashion to the Italian internet fashion retailer YOOX. The collaboration ended in 2008.

On February 28, 2008 Puma AG made Chalayan the creative director of the Puma fashion division. As a result, the clothing and shoe collections Puma by Hussein Chalayan and Puma Urban Mobility were created . In return, Puma's parent company at the time, PPR (today: Kering ), acquired a majority stake in the Hussein Chalayan brand. Puma then hired the manager Giorgio Belloli as managing director of Hussein Chalayan LLC. In 2009 Chalayan bought back the shares in his company from PPR. His involvement with Puma ended in May 2012.

At the beginning of the 2010s, Chalayan also had a cheaper second line called Gray, in addition to the main Black collection, and a collection for the Japanese market called Red . The subdivision was abandoned in 2013. Since then there has only been a single women's fashion line as the main collection. In 2008 there was a collaboration between Chalayan and the stocking manufacturer Falke . In 2009 Chalayan designed three jeans models for the Californian denim manufacturer J Brand Jeans . In mid-2011, the company founder deleted his first name from the company name, which has only been Chalayan since then . In 2011, he launched the women's perfume Airborne in collaboration with Comme des Garçons . In 2012 Chalayan designed a women's collection for the Turkish jeans manufacturer Mavi . In 2013, the production license for Chalayan women's fashion went to the Italian textile manufacturer Pier SpA . At the beginning of 2014, the owner and creative director of the French fashion house Vionnet , Goga Ashkenazi, appointed Chalayan to design the in-house demi- couture women's fashion line. At the end of 2014, under the name VSP Chalayan, Chalayan entered into a collaboration over several seasons with the Paris-based Turkish leather manufacturer VSP (Vespucci Group) on women's leather fashion.

In September 2015 Chalayan opened a flagship store in Mayfair . At the same time, he announced that he had been accepted into the Vionnet design team for the ready-to-wear collections.

Exhibitions

"Art Aspects" - extensive list of exhibitions including:

Retrospective, Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris) , 2011

I Am Sad Leyla (Üzgünüm Leyla) , Lisson Gallery, London, Great Britain (September 8 - October 2, 2010)

Hussein Chalayan - from fashion and back - first solo exhibition in Japan: Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) (April 3 - June 20, 2010), then: Istanbul Modern (July 15 - October 24, 2010)

Hussein Chalayan - first comprehensive retrospective in England: Design Museum London (22 January – 17 May 2009)

Hussein Chalayan retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (October 15, 2005– February 5, 2006)

10 years of work - first major solo exhibition in the Groninger Museum , Netherlands , April to September 2005

51st International Biennale di Venezia , representing Turkey, 2005

Museum of New Art , Karlsruhe (2004)

Institute of Contemporary Arts , London (2003)

Airmail Clothing in the "Musée de la Mode Palais du Louvre " in Paris

Seventh International Biennial in Istanbul (September 22 to November 17, 2001)

Radical fashion in the London " Victoria & Albert Museum "

FIT , New York (2001)

Tate Modern , London (2001)

Musée de la Mode, Palais du Louvre , Paris (1999)

Awards

Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) on June 17, 2006.

Artist in residence at the Wexner Center ( Ohio State University ) 2001/2002

Designer of the Year 2000 at the British Fashion Awards

British Fashion Awards Designer of the Year 1999

Lucky Strike Designer Award 2012

literature

Barbera van Kooij and Sue-An van der Zijpp (Eds.): Hussein Chalayan - Essays Caroline Evans et al. , NAI Publ., Rotterdam 2004. 191 pp. ISBN 90-5662-443-1 .