Mazri: Young Fashion Designers Spotlight (Part 2)
Transforming pain into beauty
Last month, I posted the first of my three-part Young Fashion Designers Spotlight series with Hamkah. His Lasalle graduate collection explored remix culture, linking overt ostentation of the Renaissance era to flashy Warholian streetwear of the late 2010s. It struck astute, particularly in the time of Covid-19 and the cancelled MET Gala’s theme, About Time: Fashion and Duration.
In similar social distancing news, Lasalle has since just launched their digital graduate fashion collection. I’m guessing time, more literally, played a big role in how it’s turned out.
Nevertheless, you should check out their work. Included are Samuel Xun (the 3rd fashion designer in this series), Seah Li Yi, who curated 360 garments from 60 Singaporean women to understand and define Singaporean style, and Reyme Husaini, who created Singapore’s first virtual fashion influencer.
In other unavoidable news, the world’s focus on Covid-19 has largely been redirected to concerns over police brutality and racism against black people in the United States. I chatted with my friend, Timothy, who just migrated to New York, about his experience protesting and reacting to social media activism:
A significantly more outspoken creative on social media about #blacklivesmatter, incidentally, has been Mazri. Amidst the quaking outcry over George Flyod’s murder and the knock-on activist efforts and pushback that followed, I wondered if posting about fashion would come off insensitive. The past 2 months has certainly forced me to reconsider the relevance of what we wear, definitely more so today.
If anyone deserves credit for his work today, it’s Mazri. And again, if not in the name of fashion, I hope you can extrapolate our conversation as a general statement on transforming pain into beauty.
M: FYP was an open brief. How’d you interpret it?
Maz: I knew immediately it was going to be personal, about my health. I’ve had a rare heart syndrome for ~9 years. I took back all my medical reports, wanted to make an abstract statement of them. I had to revisit my past memories, discover how I felt. Literally shut my eyes, took pencil to paper and drew silhouettes.
M: Tell me more about your heart condition.
Maz: I’ve been recently discharged, officially cured. I get random palpitation attacks—even when I’m resting, sleeping. I’m quite active, I used to do sports. It’s demoralising when I got these attacks.
I’m an emotional person, I like to see links between my work and life and/or culture. Using my experience as the backbone for this collection allowed me to put myself in a good situation to express and abstract it into fashion.
M: Does a personal reference matter once it’s been interpreted?
Maz: Ultimately, it’s an aesthetic.
M: Were you more excited or fearful using this experience?
Maz: At first, excited. But when lecturers asked me to be more personal with my work, I had to remove emotional walls. I wrote down how I felt, translated them into symbols, images, transferred them into design.
Used ECG scans as a metaphor: print, texture. I wanted to inject colour to my collection, unlike my previous work. I’ve never used bright colours. With ECG scans, green is very prominent.
I also like playing with transparent fabrics, exploring fluidity — in physical objects like fabric, social issues like gender.
Also wanted to design gloves, no reason.
M: Thoughts when you saw your lineup of looks in relation to your experience with your heart condition?
Maz: It forced me to explore my emotions. I proud to show off my range of skills, e.g. tailoring, share my interest in gender fluidity. It felt narrative, edited. I could see the process, the hard work I’ve put in. *laughs* It looks intentional.
M: Is there a “person”? There’s been this debate between gender non-binary fashion vs crossdressing.
Maz: Non-gender conforming people. It’s a mix. I’m inspired by brand Palomo Spain. It may be too extravagant for some men, but I use the male form to create the looks. It’s me, I’d definitely wear my own clothes.
M: Life after school?
Maz: Getting a job, designing on the side. I currently make bespoke dresses for drag queens, have done costumes for theatre shows.
Afterthoughts
Last night, I chatted with my friend about social media activism regarding #blacklivesmatter. Among debating various complicated topics (and admittedly clumsily handled, in my opinion), they brought up who had and hadn’t posted any reactions online. Of the few whom my friend felt had done a good job of speaking out, Mazri was highlighted (not gossiping, just matter-of-fact).
To which I replied, “Not everyone’s an activist, not everyone’s a leader. But I’m sure the actions of those who have done it first and done it well will reflect on them in the near future—and signal to everyone, non-activists and non-leaders included, who they should support.”
