Fashion designer and artist Hussein Chalayan talks to Susannah Frankel about Istanbul, an inspiring city that “embodies so many facets of life”
This article is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“I am from a very mixed background and Istanbul embodies so many facets of life, it’s like a mini world. It’s a city that came after a big empire, that covered a large area, that has thrived on multiculturalism, people cross-marrying, changing their religion. All the things we discuss now, in an urban setting, Istanbul has lived through in the past. I can almost smell that past when I’m there. Ideas of wealth, hierarchy, gentrification versus ghetto, the secular and the religious, are so extreme you see them in a clearer way. There’s also the contrast between the ugly and the beautiful – the neoclassical, art deco and art nouveau look more beautiful, more authentic, alongside things that are super-ugly, newly and cheaply built.
“I can go to Istanbul 100 times and see a different place. There’s a spontaneity to the city and the way you live through it. The streets and monuments don’t change, but everything around them is in a constant state of flux – new restaurants, cafés, galleries. There’s an element that feels European, another that’s more like Cairo. You see that in the faces – all colours, shapes, features. There’s a maritime element. I associate water with freedom, trade, food. And there’s the imagery around Atatürk [the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923]. That feels quite Soviet. There is tolerance and, obviously, bigotry and conservative people too. But in the short history since the republic was founded there is an openness. People are generous, you get invited to their houses. We have a word in Turkey – muhabbet. It means loving conversation. You can meet people and have that the very first time.”
Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1970, the fashion designer and artist Hussein Chalayan grew up based between the Cypriot and UK capitals, settling in London at 18. He graduated from Central Saint Martins in 1993, showing a collection of garments that had been buried in a friend’s garden for three months, and presented his first collection under his own name in 1994. Since then, Chalayan’s open mind, warm heart and endless flow of ideas have resulted in some of the most critically acclaimed fashion presentations and elegant clothes of the late 20th and early 21st century. His interests are diverse, broadly encompassing anthropology, history and technology. For Spring/Summer 2000 he created a remote-controlled dress based on the design of an aeroplane wing in fibreglass and resin; next came a transformable living room that famously included an expandable wooden table skirt. For his S/S07 collection, clothes morphed mechanically from high-necked Victorian to 1920s flapper to 1960s shifts. Today, Chalayan has a professorship at Hochschule für Technik in Berlin. He visits Istanbul at least three times a year. “It’s a city that encourages fluid, creative thinking, that opens connections and possibilities in my brain,” he says.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.
