If you enjoyed the dub and reggae sounds, got a buzz from seeing the intense swirly surfaces, and left without realizing that Priya Ahluwalia is a re-cyclist, then she’d be happy. “I want other people to look at it and love it because they love it,” she exclaimed, swerving from talk of how she orchestrated the mosaic of ribbon embroidery, weaving, and patchwork in her new collection. “Because, you know what? I’ve realized that with repurposing and stuff, people don’t really like it. Not really. So,” she shrugged with a sidelong grin, “I just realized I need to make it sick.”
Ahluwalia is living proof that whatever people’s preconceptions, sustainable fashion today isn’t a look, it’s a process; a mind-spinning set of solutions that her generation is busy inventing. “I mean, it is going that way. Everyone can see the world’s on fire.”
This is Ahluwalia’s fourth collection since she graduated from Westminster University in 2018, a whirlwind of energy and positivity whose Indian-Nigerian heritage led her on the trail of what happens with the dumping of Western clothing waste in the countries where both sides of her family live. Through rigorous research, resolve, charm, and persuasion, she’s rapidly progressed.
Her collection, dubbed Frequency, was inspired by thinking about 1965, the year her stepfather was born. The set was an imaginary rendering of a front room of the time; the influences of a journey through the comparative experiences happening in London’s swinging ’60s; in America, where Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches in Selma, Alabama; and in Asia, where conflict was raging on the India-Pakistan border. “I wanted to do it in a nuanced way,” she said. “I did a lot of research from my family’s culture, art, music from Nigeria, London, India, the Caribbean, and looking at a lot of Blaxploitation movies.”
What tied it together were the swirly domestic sub-psychedelic prints by Barbara Brown—the kind of graphics, with a lot of brown and orange involved, that heavily influenced the wallpapers and fabrics furnishing every suburban home through the ’60s and ’70s. “That’s why I came up with all the curved cutting,” she said. “That’s why I quilted the puffa coats with waves in them. All the patchworks have curves.”
Ahluwalia’s material resourcing is impressive. The jeans were found in a denim factory in Tunisia that uses organic and recycled cotton, and the wiggle patterns on them were lasered. “Obviously, I don’t want to use bleach,” she said. Color-blocked sweaters were knitted from “good yarn—organic certified lambswool and recycled nylon.” The beaded embroidery on sleeves was “hand-done with a social enterprise in India.” And the expertly pieced-together shirting was “sponsored by a company called Scoop, who’ve got loads of excess fabric they want to get rid of.” Bigger companies are clearly seeing the benefits of getting involved with young leaders like Ahluwalia. “Adidas [is] helping me with deadstock or damaged stock. They give me that,” she added.
Finally, the desirability of her pieces is training buyers to accept that everything they order from her can’t be identically run-of-the-mill. “Some of the things are one of one. So in production each one will be slightly different.”
It’s amazing to see designers like Ahluwalia, kids of the 2000s, growing up in a time when streetwear was the norm, who are now lifting it to a higher design plane, bringing new cultural energies to fashion, and sewing positive change into everything they do.
