Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan is a very enigmatic personality who keeps his personal life guarded. His parents separated when he was quite young and he was primarily raised by his mother who was a major influence on the development of his artistic abilities.

Hussein Chalayan was born on 12 August 1970, in Nicosia, Cyprus, to Muslim parents. The 1970s was a period of political turmoil in the nation, marked by rampant acts of violence. The ongoing ethnic conflicts between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities eventually led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus which resulted in escalating violence against the civilians from both sides.

Chalayan’s family was forced to flee their homeland and move to England in 1978. There he graduated from Highgate School following which he enrolled for a National Diploma in fashion and clothing at Warwickshire School of Arts.

He then proceeded to study Fashion Design at the prestigious Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in 1989. Creative with an intellectual bent of mind, he soon earned a reputation for being one of the most radical design students in the institute.

In 1993, he presented his graduate collection titled "The Tangent Flows", in which he displayed clothes that he had buried in a back yard for six weeks and exhumed just before the show. The process of burial and decay was a reference to life, death, and urban decay.

Hussein Chalayan did an internship with Savile Row tailor Timothy Everest following which Chalayan established his own independent design label in 1993 and founded a company Cartesia Ltd. in 1994.

He displayed his first collection in London’s West Soho Galleries and made his debut at London Fashion Week which was a critically acclaimed success. During this time, he came up with the idea of body-inhibiting designs such as his cocoon dress that bound the arms of the wearer to the sides of the body.

In his fashion designs he sought to infuse intellectual and technological elements, integrating human body and clothing with science and culture. His catwalks were more of theatrical performances than just fashion shows.

In 1995, he worked with the avant-garde star Björk and designed several creations for her including the jacket that Björk wears on the cover of her album ‘Post.’ The singer modeled for Chalayan in October 1995 for London Fashion week.

Chalayan was appointed as creative director of TSE New York in 1998 and launched his sportswear collection for the band. The same year, he organized a catwalk which featured female models in varying degrees of nudity with their heads covered in traditional female Muslim headdresses. This stirred some controversy in the Muslim world, but also added to the designer’s reputation as an innovative and experimental one.

He displayed a series of architectural dresses in the ‘Before minus now’ collection for Spring/Summer 2000 where the dresses featured wire-frame architectural prints against static white backgrounds that were generated by a computer program.

His “Remote Control” dress which incorporated the aerodynamics of airplane travel into its form was the first wireless device to be presented as a fully functioning fashion garment. It was showcased at the Hyères Festival in France in 2000.

He designed a series of laser LED dresses in collaboration with luxury label Swarovski which was showcased in Tokyo in 2008.