Hussein Chalayan

Hussein Chalayan, (Hüseyin Çağlayan ; born 12 August 1970) is a British-Cypriot fashion designer.

Hussein Chalayan was born in Nicosia in 1970 and graduated from the Türk Maarif Koleji secondary school in his hometown.

At that time the population of the island was divided because of the constant struggles between the Greek and Turkish authorities.

Ethnic conflicts between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities eventually led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and led to human right abuses towards civilians on both sides.

For this reason Chalayan and his family were forced to move to England in 1978.

After attending Highgate School, he studied for a National Diploma in fashion and clothing at the Warwickshire School of Arts, and proceeded to study Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

His graduate collection in 1993, titled "The Tangent Flows", contained clothes which he had buried in a back yard and exhumed just before the show where they were presented with an accompanying text that explained the process.

The ritual of burial and resurrection was said to give the garments a dimension that referenced life, death, and urban decay.

The work attracted the attention of the Browns fashion boutique in London who borrowed the collection to feature in their window display.

Chalayan established his own company in 1994, Cartesia Ltd., as well as his ready-to-wear line, Hussein Chalayan (which he changed in 2010 to just "Chalayan" because of the oriental connotation of his first name, Hussein).

Hussein Chalayan's fashion shows are characterised by minimal sets and a mood of suspense, incorporating elements of contemporary interiors, urban architecture, and geometric structures.

In the shows the conceptual and theoretical inspirations behind his garments are played out across the body.

In 1995 Chalayan clinched a London fashion design award organised by the company "Absolut".

Chalayan won a £28,000 grant to develop creations for the British capital's Fashion Week in October 1995.

In the same year, Chalayan worked with avant-garde star Björk, designing the jacket featured on the cover of her album Post.

Björk's Post tour also featured several creations by Chalayan and Björk modelled for Chalayan in October 1995 for London Fashion week.

His collection Lands Without for Spring/Summer 1997 featured several "Kite" dresses, which were notable because of the way in which he directed the relationship between his garments and the body, and his use of architectural proportions to amplify their interplay with their surroundings.

In his collection Between for Spring/Summer 1998 he sent models onto the catwalk wearing black chadors of varying lengths and nothing else, alluding to fashion's continual shift of erogenous zones around the female body arising in response to changing ideals.

The first was nude apart from a mask covering her face.

Each veil became longer and longer until, finally, the last one wore a chador which covered most of her body and allowed a gap just for her eyes.

According to Chalayan this piece was about defining cultural territory.'

The Panoramic collection for Fall/Winter 1998 expressed the idea of infinity in a surreal cityscape of geometric forms and distorted images.

The models were distorted into generic shapes and unified by architectural proportions; cones were fixed to the top of the head and faces and bodies swathed in black to obscure their identity.

As Chalayan explored the idea of representing nature in this collection, he broke it down into its most basic graphic representation, pixels.

Body and clothing were then merged into a digital landscape, which was recreated in enlarged cube-shaped pixels.

In the Autumn of 1998, while still designing his signature line, he was appointed as a design consultant for New York knitwear label TSE.

He has won the British Designer of the Year twice (in 1999 and 2000), and he was awarded the MBE in 2006.

Chalayan is currently teaching at HTW Berlin.

For his Echoform collection for Autumn/Winter 1999 Chalayan created leather dresses inspired by car interiors to represent externalising speed.

He also mimicked aeroplane interiors by attaching padded headrests to dresses This project was based on exploring the relationship of the body's inherent mobility and aimed to evoke thoughts on speed, spatiality and well-being.

His Geotrophics collection for Spring/Summer 1999 had already featured Chair Dresses that represented the idea of a nomadic existence and a completely transportable environment.

The Before minus now collection for Spring/Summer 2000 contained a series of architectural dresses which evolved from his collaboration with B Consultants, a London-based firm of architectural engineers.

The dresses featured wire-frame architectural prints against static white backgrounds, generated by a computer program that allows designers to draw within a range of three-dimensional perspectives inside an architectural landscape.

The images were then transferred onto silk and cotton fabrics using a mechanised fabric-printing process.

This collection also featured the "Remote Control" dress which premiered at the Hyères Festival in France in 2000 and clearly illustrated Chalayan's interest in technology.

The dress incorporated the aerodynamics of aeroplane travel into its form and aesthetic and was considered a hi-tech triumph that connected fashion to technology and technology to the body, establishing a dialogue between the body and the environment.

The Remote Control dress was the first wireless device to be presented as a fully functioning fashion garment.

This concept was later expanded in Chalayan's After Words collection for Fall/Winter 2000.

which included some of his most well known designs such as ‘the coffee table dress'.

His collaboration with them lasted till 2001 when the company decided not to renew his contract.