The Textile Storyteller: Hadiyah Hussain

Hadiyah Hussain is a textiles designer joining the dots between London and the lives that walk its streets. A cluster of culture, colour, textures and flavour, it’s a city of vast diversity. And yet, according to Hadiyah, this is something rarely discussed. Using textiles as a platform for storytelling, Hadiyah combines fabrics and prints which represent her version of the city: Walthamstow, friends, nightclub walls and art galleries, cosmopolitan London and her Pakistani roots. Bursting at the seams with cultural reference points, each piece of clothing she creates is unique from the next – a visual diary of her day-to-day life.

We met Hadiyah after she designed her own pair of Air Max for Nike By You. Now she’s here to chat about finding her style, owning her craft and looking forwards instead of back.

“My style is a culture clash combination of my South Asian heritage and the London streets that surround me. Growing up and going to school and uni, I always noticed that there was such a lack of education around other people's cultural backgrounds, which is confusing as London is such a multicultural city. It’s something we sometimes don’t even realise or think about until we walk into our friends’ family homes and discover this unique bubble of life and culture we never even knew was there. Behind each door there’s a different story: different foods, different languages, an entirely different world that’s totally separate from our own.”

“All my work is based on primary research. I’m constantly taking photographs of the things around me: Walthamstow Market where I grew up, and the fabric shops and spice stalls there, the interiors and prints in my friends’ family homes, textiles, restaurants and bars. Then I lay all the photos out in front of me and create a collage of contrasting moments, colours and stories. Once I’ve done that, I start looking at fabrics and prints to use, and then I build the silhouettes – which I tend to keep quite simple.”

“I think it's so important to use your own voice through your work. It's a way of shouting and screaming something, but in such a beautiful format. And even if what you’re shouting feels ugly to you, it will be beautiful to someone else, as it’s connecting them with their own inner thoughts and feelings that either they didn’t realise they had, or it becomes a way of helping them articulate their thoughts in a way they didn’t know how. I’ve had a lot of people say they really appreciate what I’m doing for that very reason, which I love because that’s what arts all about really, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t even found my style yet. I’m still developing and developing with every project I create, but right now I want to carry on telling stories through the work I create, giving the faces and places of London a voice. I want to keep inspiring others by doing workshops and talks, and I want to meet more people from my community that I don’t get to connect with on a daily basis. In five years time, I want to have an established brand which will allow me to create an endless amount of work and art, all based around the idea of storytelling through textiles.”

If you’d like to create your own pair of Nike shoes, like Hadiyah herself, give Nike By You a go.