An unmissable graphic is planted on the center back of a jacket and the chest of a sweatshirt in Priya Ahluwalia’s new collection. “It’s a new emblem, a compass made up of Afro combs, facing the four corners of the world,” she said. “It’s because I’ve been looking at lots of ideas around migration—whether it’s migration of the mind, of people, ancestors, or ideas.” The title of the collection underscored that: Traces.
Ahluwalia is a leader in making sustainably sourced clothes for young men in the crossover between the streetwear and designer fashion genres. That’s just one level of who she is. Much more: She’s an eloquent spokesperson among the rising forces of young British designers and creative people of color and an employer of peers; a born Londoner who is exerting every experience she’s lived and connected with through her friends and family heritages in Nigeria and India. “I feel like: How can I put that into the world and amplify it?” she said. “What happens to human beings as we migrate around the world?”
She’s down-to-earth in one way—these are pragmatically wearable pieces, rooted in her retro-flavored language of soccer kits, polo shirts, track pants, and denim. The piped seaming is the Ahluwalia solution for making a style signifier out of the need to patchwork disparate recycled and upcycled materials, for instance. But she’s a voracious researcher too. She read Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing “about two sisters separated at birth in Ghana in the 1700s and what happens to each generation after. There’s a chapter set in the Harlem renaissance. It’s a really good example of when multiple cultures come together because of migration—and it’s really important for literature, film, music, and the arts,” she said. Ahluwalia studied the art of Kerry James Marshall and Jacob Lawrence for inspiration for her color palette. “All of that research and looking into these things filters out through my work,” she said. “I feel really proud of this history that I was never given opportunities to learn.”
That lack of opportunities doesn’t come from a lack of education. Ahluwalia has a master’s degree in menswear from the University of Westminster. It was while there that she realized, on trips to visit family in Nigeria and India, that she was witnessing the visible trail of fashion overproduction, involving the dumping of Western-branded sportswear on African countries and connecting that with the clothing manufacturing chain of exploitation of people in South Asia. Understanding that system is what initially led her to check out every single impact of the clothes she makes. “My label is a curation of values, through how we choose our fabrics to everything else,” she said.
What she meant by a lack of learning opportunities is that British education as a whole still obscures its colonial past. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, the fact that our education system is set up like a bracket around imperialism, from the Tudors through the Victorians,” said Ahluwalia. “It’s so obvious what their agenda is with that, right? I’ve just realized that I have to learn my own history about what my ancestors were doing, and what the British role in slavery was, as well as the American.”
Since the Black Lives Matter movement hit Britain after the killing of George Floyd last year—there were protests and demonstrations all over the U.K.—the lid is only just starting to be pried off the centuries-long impacts of the rapacious British Empire. It was surely loaded with significance that Ahluwalia chose to film the Traces collection in a place that looks like an ornate gothic-cum-Islamic palace: In fact it’s a Victorian pumping station, built at the height of the empire. Ask this generation of Black British people in fashion a question now and whole worlds of fresh perspectives are finally beginning to be seen.
