Nasir Mazhar: The hit brand at the junction of hip-hop and street fashion
IN THE WEEKLY RUBRIC "NEW MARK" Wonderzine presents young designers and tells where and how you can buy their things. Our hero this week is hatter Nazir Mazhar, who has decided to make clothes at the intersection of street fashion for men and women.
Nazir Mazhar was born and grew up in a Turkish Cypriot family in East London, where, as is customary, the majority of modern young British designers live and work. Nazir began as a hairdresser in one of the Vidal Sassoon salons on Brick Lane, worked on the Showgirls Kylie Minogue tour and sewed complex architectural hats. After two years of Nazira's work as a hatter in London theaters from The Barbican to The Royal Opera House, The Globe and The Royal National Theater, he is noticed by the stylists Lady Gaga and Nikola Formicetti. So Nazir gets into the right environment. In 2007, his hat appears on the cover of the new album Roisin Murphy "Overpowered", a year later Madonna appears in Nazir Mazhar's helmet on the cover of Dazed & Confused, in 2012 he is ordered headgear for the opening ceremony of the London Summer Olympics, as well as design hats - Gareth Pugh and Henry Holland.
In 2008, Nazir receives a grant from the Topshop and the British Fashion Council and sews the first men's collection, which she presents during London Fashion Week. Until 2013, the designer will arrange only small presentations of the collections, which his friend film director Grace Ladoya, one of the participants of the SHOWstudio video project of photographer Nick Knight, shoots on camera. These presentations will each time be accompanied by performances of young London artists - the alliance of the brand with music has become a strategically correct step. If you look back, fashion, and especially British fashion, was shaped according to the principle of communities around music: think of skinheads, mods, the movement of punks and buffalo girls (the last two formed Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Westwood in the late 1970s). However, Malcolm Maclaren once said that fashion is the most musical form of art. For the last male show, Nazira Spring-Summer - 2015, the soundtrack was recorded by the grim British artist Skepta, who once went to the show of another young musical English brand Cassette Playa, which we also recently wrote about.
Thus, Nazir Mazhar is walking along the beaten track, forming a community around him that actively supports the designer and spreads the brand’s ideas, giving people the desire to be implicated in the brand. It is not surprising that at the Nazir shows there are girlfriends and acquaintances of a young designer, completely different girls and, importantly, not professional models: Asian and mulatto, thin and with forms. First of all, the designer’s clothes offer them: basketball shorts, hoodie, caps, garters, masks resembling respirators of the early 2000s, mini skirts, crop tops, wide pants, as in TLC clips of the 90s yo Secondly, they support the idea of cohesion around the brand.
In a short time, Nazir Mazhard made everyone talk about himself, it seems that all publications - critics argue whether the Nazir brand style will be as influential as the Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein and Rick Owens styles. We think so. Logomania, which offers Nazir, with might and main to work on the brand - young people react to things with the Nazir logos just as they did on Calvin Klein 20 years ago, feeling themselves part of one movement.
Nazir went on another true path for many British designers, enlisting the support of the right friends from the fashion industry. We recently wrote about how the community helped Jonathan Saunders get through. So, Nazira’s shows are styled by a designer’s girlfriend, one of the main modern stylists, an Englishwoman, Anna Trevelyan, who is the fashion director of Machine-A and collaborates with Ashish. Not surprisingly, Nazira purchased one of the new and progressive London concept stores Machine-A on Brewer Street in Soho, where things like reputable designers hang around Nazir on 600 square meters of the store: Ashish Gupta, Hussein Chalayan, Christopher Rebern and Raf Simons .
In the last collection I donned masks on models by chance. They resemble insurgent masks and symbolize readiness to fight. Maybe it sounds strange, but by wrestling I mean my fight with other designers. I am on the other side of the barricades. Now I am busy creating the wardrobe of the modern generation, its image and its uniform. And this wardrobe will be called Nasir Mazhar.
Where to buy things Nasir Mazhar
Nazir has more than 16 outlets worldwide. Nasir Mazhar items and hats can be bought in many stores: in the Machine-A and Opening Ceremony concept stores in London, in Henrik Vibskov Boutique in Copenhagen, in Kokon to Zai in Paris, in Space Mue and Addicted in Seoul, in four stores in Hong Kong, in Opening Ceremony in New York and Los Angeles, as well as in the New York VFILES, in five stores in Japan, in the Milan Wok Store and in a number of places that can be checked on the designer's website. In Moscow, women's and men's belongings can be found from September. Mark bought "Kuznetsk Bridge 20".