When clothier Priya Ahluwalia walked into the gown rehearsal of her autumn/winter 2023 London Style Week present in February, she couldn’t cease crying.
Titled Symphony, the present was staged at a previously baroque church corridor, with fashions strolling to jazz-infused renditions performed by pianist Insxght and saxophonist Solaariss.
“I used to be simply so emotional,” the 30-year-old founder and inventive director of Ahluwalia says. “It was just like the end result of a giant deep dive coming collectively. That’s how I felt.”
Ahluwalia rediscovered the music of her youth when designing the gathering. “I don’t love to do issues in an apparent means,” Ahluwalia admits. “As life modifications, you take heed to various things at totally different phases, so I assumed in regards to the visuals of what music appears like when designing Symphony.
“I Will At all times Love You by Whitney Houston was on the radio after I was born. So my mum finds that tune actually particular and performed it to me so much. Sade’s Kiss Of Life was fairly informative, and 50 Cent was additionally in there too. I bear in mind getting certainly one of his albums after I was 10 and pondering it was phenomenal. I additionally thought so much about Prince, Queen, Freddie Mercury and even conventional Punjabi music.”
Sound waves and musical notes impressed the lasered print on denim, jacquard patterns on mohair knitwear and monitor tops with accompanying shorts. Earthy shadows, reds and ochres have been taken from the colors of album covers and illuminated cotton separates.
Ahluwalia launched her eponymous trend label in 2018 after graduating from the MA Menswear course on the College of Westminster, combining her twin Indian-Nigerian heritage and London roots, whereas additionally exploring the potential of classic and surplus clothes.
Round that point, Ahluwalia visited her father in Nigeria and says she observed “paupers” sporting secondhand clothes from the UK. “I used to be actually confused and began to ask questions on it,” she says – and it led to the publishing of her first ebook, Candy Lassi, exploring the secondhand clothes trade within the International South.
“Discovering methods for individuals to cherish their clothes eternally has at all times been vital to me,” Ahluwalia says. “Microsoft and I labored on a platform known as Flow into in 2021, the place we use AI to crowdsource and categorise individuals’s undesirable clothes. However now, I believe customers actually see the worth in studying in regards to the issues that occur behind the scenes of the garments they’re buying.”
It’s why particular person clothes from the Symphony assortment function Digital ID expertise — created and linked by the EON Product Cloud platform, powered by Microsoft Azure. Ahluwalia prospects can scan with their cellphones to find their merchandise’s distinctive story, together with the design inspiration, manufacturing processes and origins of the sourced supplies, serving to customers higher perceive how their garments will be resold, reused and recycled.
“This provides us the chance to actually share unique content material and details about a product. As a up to date luxurious model promoting objects which might be round £400, it’s vital to offer our prospects with extra worth and share the tales behind their garments, while encouraging them to have interaction with sustainability.”
However Ahluwalia doesn’t wish to be pigeonholed as a sustainable designer. “I’m a lot greater than making the appropriate decisions,” she says. “I’m a designer in the beginning, who can also be a inventive director, filmmaker of Pleasure and Beloved, who works sustainably to discover and redefine the inherent great thing about blackness [and brownness] by means of an genuine lens.
“The imaginative and prescient is that at some point somebody can be sitting on Ahluwalia of their entrance room, watching it, sporting it, smelling it and consuming it. A complete 360. I might love Ahluwalia to be an instance of how concepts that aren’t so rooted in Eurocentric values are expandable and wonderful on a world stage for individuals to work together with in a world sense, like we see with many conventional European [fashion] homes.”
So what’s subsequent for the style home?
“We’re doing a present at London Style Week in September, however I can’t let you know something about it. The one factor that I can let you know is that we’re holding the present on the British Library, which I’m actually enthusiastic about.”
Uncover extra about Ahluwalia’s partnership with Microsoft and EON right here: Ahluwalia Symphony Unlocked | Microsoft Unlocked.
Phrases: Yolanthe Fawehinmi, PA. Photos: PA
