Why was there a top patchworked from doilies, a runway piled with North African and Turkish rugs, and a beaded curtain at the entrance to Priya Ahluwalia’s show? Simple: it was about home-y associations. “I’ve called the collection Home Sweet Home—it’s my exploration of what home means to me,” said the designer. “I feel like home is a physical place, but it’s also a concept. Like, how you could feel at home with a person, or you could feel at home on the other side of the world somewhere you love.”
Emotional ties between her and her dual family heritages in India and Nigeria were bound up in it. “I spoke to my grandma, my Nana, about her leaving her home in India and moving to England. She was saying to me that she left over 40 years ago, but there’s always this pull for her emotionally that pulls her home.”
The patterns, textiles, prints and knitwear were reminiscent of suburban wallpaper, light glinting on swimming pools or the sea. One-shoulder ‘sari’ shapes and drapes of knotted fabric stood for family bonds, and the beaded curtains familiar in Nigerian households became beaded ‘wigs.’
The warmth and excitement Ahluwalia generates around her brand has long been central to the community feeling that connects her creative British peers who are immigrants, children and grandchildren of immigrants. A lot of that’s to do with the film and music scene she’s plugged into. This time, she involved Afrobeats star Adekunle Gold and MassiveMusic for the soundtrack. MassiveMusic, Ahluwalia explained, “do many things, but one of the most exciting to me is their huge database of recordings of people playing traditional instruments in refugee camps. They then package them for producers to use, and if they do, the fee goes to the musician. We used some of the tracks in the show.”
She also commissioned a kanan (a middle eastern stringed instrument) for a performance to preface the show by musician Shaza Manla. “Shaza is a Syrian refugee,” Ahluwalia said. “I feel like we’re paying homage to people who have their human right to home disrupted. They deserve to feel at home somewhere like all of us.”
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