Transparent Leather, Liquid Indigo And Prints From Waste Flowers: Fashion Week Is Back

Fashion week paused during Covid, and their reintroduction this month makes me ponder: what role do fashion shows play in the current environment? With designers able to market themselves on social media, and sell directly to consumers, why the hullabaloo of fashion shows, and the financial burden that comes with them?

The lid was lifted on the extortionate cost of staging runway shows a couple of years back when the cost versus potential revenue was called into question. Most designers, it seems, follow the well-trodden fashion week path in search of credibility, limelight, and commercial opportunity.

With this in mind, I ventured to a designer exhibition by Asim Khan–his first for the brand he established during Covid, called 3rd Migration. I was lured by the promise of transparent leathers, unconventionally dyed and printed: the promise of something new. But would it also answer my question about why Fashion Week is the right platform for such a brand?

In the exhibition space, a stack of TV screens played concurrent memories: a hypnotic Bollywood dancer, eyes fixed on me; a skinhead in well-worn doc martens; a family photo, Asim Khan seated between his two-piece-suited grandfather and saree-swathed grandmother. And on a screen in the bottom left corner, Asim Khan in the present day, his hands plunged in a bucket of liquid indigo and wringing a bundle of leather. The language of his life and work are closer to art than clothing. The screens share a cultural dance between India, Pakistan, and England–via Japan of treasures, he collected along the way. This, I’m reminded, is what the London Fashion Week scene serves up best: highly refined and expressive art of tortuous and sometimes painful origins.  

And we’d do well to remember that, because if the focus of London Fashion Week becomes commerce, that creative magic has to translate into hard currency, rather than simply being the point. And regarding commerce, I recall in my days as a struggling knitwear brand owner, trying to define the intangible asset of ‘brand value’, which amounts to the perceived power of the brand to garner devotees that will part with cash. Prioritization of creative expression and intangible ‘brand value’ has been the foundation of British fashion for decades, with blatant commerciality often frowned upon as reductive and uncreative. But for designers wanting to establish a livelihood by selling fashion collections, showing at London Fashion Week often spells debt, according to designer Christopher Shannon, amongst others. But back to London Fashion week and Asim Khan’s debut: Why fashion week, and why now?

Khan’s work drew me to fashion week for two reasons: novel materials and immense expertise. Materials are arguably the central focus of innovation in fashion (and categorically the biggest source of environmental impact) and Khan has over two decades of experience traveling the world to learn, then commercially apply, materials techniques. His work spans textiles and leather development for Stone Island, Ecco Leather, and Apple; “I’ve just been working with Jony Ive”, he tells me as we chat amongst his hybrid leather/tweed/embroidered womenswear creations, collectively entitled First Youth.

So why present this work, why the experimental materials, and what is Khan’s end game? Is it commercial sales? Creative expression? Both? 

Covid, says Khan, allowed him to indulge in the research and development he’d been longing to do for years, but had never had the time or resources for. In collaboration with Ecco Leather, he spent long days in their R&D lab in Holland, developing chemical-free methods for printing and dyeing organic, vegetable-tanned and transparent leather using waste flowers and natural indigo. He collaged Shibori and indigo dyeing techniques, with Mughal imagery and memories of floral interiors in his family home in Manchester, drawing on his British and South Asian roots.   

And somewhere in the overlapping narrative of the video clips showing Doc Martens-clad skinheads and nimble Pakistani embroiderers’ hands I felt the identity, allegiance, and wonder that only fashion can conjure, and understood this fashion story, and its reason for existence; and Khan underscored the point, explaining that First Youth is not a commercial collection. “It is the story of three migrations, firstly the British to India, then the migration of my family from Pakistan to the UK, and thirdly, the journeys between the two—back to India and Pakistan” expressed in Khan’s hybrid materials and subculture-influenced silhouettes and styling. 

When I first wrestled with the question of fashion week’s point, I forgot that fashion isn’t clothes. Fashion is a language of culture, design, self-expression, and human ingenuity. The stuff that focuses our attention on transactions, scalability, and commerciality is clothes, which are functional, but not necessarily enriching. And maybe Covid has focused our attention a little too much on transactions, diverting attention away from creators, their stories, and the ultimate contribution they make to a multi-billion dollar industry.

To realize this collection of leather and tweed womenswear, Khan spent four days hand-printing each piece of leather with flowers, transferring both their form (as a print) and pigment (as dye), and leaving the surface free of chemical ‘fixers’. Ecco Leather Design Director and Product Development Specialist, Christine Mukakasa, explained that the color fastness and commercial performance of the technique have not yet been tested, and the process of direct flower-printing for commercial materials is likely to be cost-prohibitive. However, Khan’s developments will catalyze explorations into natural dyeing and printing techniques for Ecco’s commercial customers believes Mukakasa. Ecco Leather, she explained during an interview, is dense with technical expertise and capacity for research and development–but it’s new, unconventional ideas they crave (which Khan and other collaborators provide). This, no doubt, contributes to Ecco Leather’s brand value in the eyes of commercial clients, facilitating the parting with cash that I mentioned earlier. 

Aside from Khan’s leather treatment techniques, a critical step in the creation of First Youth was newly-developed leather embroidery methods by Aleph Studio in Pakistan. Only after 18 months of materials testing and development of new tools and techniques was it possible to embroider on the leathers Khan created. What began with the artisans’ words “no way, we can’t (embroider) leather”, became “we don’t want to go back to embroidering silk and wool”; for they had developed a method of embroidery that no longer relied on the overlapping threads of woven fabrics. Instead, it demanded handling of the leather as a creative canvas that upon piercing with an embroidery tool was permanently altered, adding a new element of ‘structural engineering’ to the embroidery process. So sophisticated is this combination of new skills that the embroiderers are asking studio founder Allia Zahid which unconventional materials she will throw at them next. Zahid believes the techniques they have developed are novel, and there is more room for refinement and extension of their craft-based innovation. I wonder if this might include embroidering mycelium-based leathers, given that Ecco Leather is currently developing non-animal-based ‘leather alternatives’ to add to their material portfolio.  

First Youth is a project of passion, innovation, and cultural pollination. It’s not trying to be commercial (it was funded by Khan himself, with support from Ecco Leather and Harris Tweed), and thank goodness for that. The next stop for 3rd Migration? Hopefully, the V&A, says Khan, where he would like to share First Youth with a wider audience. As ‘the world’s leading museum for Art and Design’ it seems a fitting place to impart what Khan has learned as a British Asian material researcher and developer, traveling the world and fusing cultural and artistic narratives.