November 17, 2022 |
It might come as a surprise to hear that Priya Ahluwalia, 29, staged her first catwalk show only a year ago. That’s because the designer’s namesake label, through progress made during the pandemic, has been transformed from a promising young business to one destined to be London Fashion Week’s next big headliner.
Ahluwalia trudged through lockdowns by putting out a series of fashion films: five in total, one of which premiered as part of the inaugural GucciFest. Her vibrant collections, informed by her Indian-Nigerian heritage, collage tailoring with sportswear and in 2021 the designer scored a hat-trick, bagging the QueenElizabeth II Award for British Design and the BFC/GQ designer fund as well as being crowned a Leader of Change for Environment at the Fashion Awards.
Her AW22 collection came caked in the language and spirit of Nollywood and Bollywood cinema. “Both genres have brilliant representations of what it is to be Black and brown through their own lenses, not through a Eurocentric gaze,” says Ahluwalia.
The collection put the romanticism that surrounds Bollywood and the sensuality that bleeds from Nollywood in a high fashion blender. Out came glamorous, glitter-laden shirts, which took their cues from the hand-painted movie posters of both genres. Ahluwalia’s signature piped tracksuits came drenched in sunset oranges and aquatic blues, paired with hybrid suit jackets and Nollywood-inspired halternecks that migrated into pleated mini-skirts which borrowed their twisted draping from a traditional sari.
“With both areas of cinema, men are often quite dressed up, so we wanted to step out and show up,” adds the designer, who combines brightly-hued corduroys with print-laden sportswear and laser-etched denim. Graduating from the University of Westminster with an MA in Menswear in 2018, Ahluwalia has quickly evolved her label into a co-ed offering. “You can be a bit more playful with womenswear,” she says, admitting that she designs a lot for herself: the brand’s party-girl dresses are born of the hangover from London’s early noughties UK garage boom. “I grew up through the peak of UK garage but I wasn’t able to get into any of the clubs because I was too young. My family listened to it a lot and I used to wish so much I could go to the clubs with them and drink a rum and coke,” the designer told us in an interview in 2020.
A pillar of Ahluwalia’s business is upcycling and designing with an eco-conscious hat on. It began with her graduate collection. After visiting Lagos in 2017, the then-student spotted street sellers sporting distinctly British clothing, bought from a second-hand clothing market in the city largely pumped with unsold British charity shop donations. Her curiosity brought the designer to Panipat, a city 50 miles north of Delhi, where she created the photobook Sweet Lassi, which documented the mountains upon mountains of waste clothing dumped in what is nicknamed “the cast-off capital”. She created her entire graduate collection using deadstock and vintage garments; an ethos she has carried through to her collections today.
Ahluwalia is currently drinking in the thrill of a slew of career milestones. She made it to the finals of the 2020 LVMH Prize, where the award sum was split between all eight shortlisted designers, and has a thriving e-commerce platform, launched with a guerrilla billboard campaign across the UK last year. She also has a collaboration with British heritage brand Mulberry under her belt – with Ahluwalia remixing a series of Icon Mulberry bags to spotlight the beauty of Black hair – and in April of this year, the brand was the inaugural collaborator of Paul Smith’s new capsule collection concept &PaulSmith, fusing the codes of both brands into one cohesive edit.
“I’m a lot more confident now,” she says, “I feel more developed. Each season I want to see the brand keep improving. I’ve got a great team around me and there’s people in the business now that can do things that are not my domain – that’s a luxury I didn’t have a couple of years ago.”
Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – out now. Purchase here.
