According to The Language of Clothes, author and academic scholar Lurie claims that long before you approach a person “on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, [one] announces your sex, age, and class…through what [one] is wearing [giving] important information (or misinformation) as to [one’s] occupation, origin, personality, opinions, tastes, sexual desires and current mood” (Lurie 3). Lurie’s assessment is not far from the truth, as fashion today has indeed become not only the sign of the times, it has become a sign system in itself. Whether it’s the “Japanese-American lady in Western dress…with an elaborate Oriental hairdo, or the Oxford-educated Arab who tops his Savile Row suit with a turban” (Lurie 7), fashion has become a powerful tool in exclaiming one’s socio-political stance and self-identity. Yet today in a world where one can buy into a lifestyle by picking the latest hippest manikin wear, the issue of authenticity… ‘to be real’ has always been an issue of constant debate. What then, one must wonder, revolves inside the minds of the fashion gurus…what is it about these people that enable them to create the “alpha consumer who is ceaselessly courted…[becoming] more sophisticated and more difficult to win over” (Wolf 173), yet are vital components in generating trends?
Meet Alyasha Owerka-Moore, one of the illest if not hippest urban fashion designers in the world. A native of Brooklyn yet fluent in Cantonese, Alyasha travels the globe through his network of hip hop musicians, world renown graphic artists, die-hard skateboarders, fresh graf-bombers, and the other hip masses of the world. This is his world. Working with well recognized urban fashion houses from Mecca, to Phat Farm, to Alphanumeric just to name a few…Alyasha is soon to open his own store and private line in the following months. MATHLAB will open in Down Town, San Diego’s own Soho on F and 10th street.
The following interview took place outside ‘F Coffee’ over glasses of iced mocha.
EM: What is fashion to you…is it a reflection of society…are there deep philosophical undertones within it…
Alyasha: I always look at it from an objective perspective…fashion is a necessity that’s fine tuned or given an aesthetic value to please different people and then it becomes an expression like some clothes are not necessarily available but are definitely aesthetically pleasing to some people…(laugh) so I suppose you can equate it to art at some points but for first and foremost it starts off as a necessity to be sheltered and then people turn into wanting to look like this or that which sounds like a real clinical description…but it’s really fun, it’s something I definitely love to do…
EM: Speaking of which, how did you get started in fashion design?
Alyasha: I guess working for my mom, my mom is a textile
conservator…she does mostly pre-Columbian and ancient-African art…lot
of stuff from the Far East like textiles and tapestries…no
carpets…mostly wall hangings or clothing and re-weaves and re-dyes…she
mounts them for museum presentations and private art collectors and
dealers…so I basically earned my allowance working for her and then in
the late ‘80s and early ‘90s I started collecting lots of Polo
stuff…and basically I became a clothes horse…just got really psyched
on Polo and a friend of mine and
I were on the train one day we were like, “It’s real interesting how
Ralph Lauren’s target market is upper middle class white America” but
most of the people that we saw…I think we’re pretty accurate in our
assumptions that probably a good sixty percent of the people that were
actually buying Polo were Black, Latin, and Asian kids from the inner
cities…I guess it just goes to shows that to me the best hip hop label
or brand has and always will be Polo and it just shows that you don’t
have to market to somebody to be affiliated or associated with the
clothing because if you look at all the old black…look at Grand Puba…all
he was rockin’ before Hilfiger started to cater to our market was
Hilfiger and it was dope…all the cats were rockin’ was Polo, Hilfiger,
Benetton. Look at North Face…if you ask North Face how much their sales
is in the city like in New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo…inner-cities
verses Colorado or Arizona…they don’t need to mark, they don’t need
advertising sources…(laugh) Anyway how did I get in fashion? Our
argument was it would be interesting to do something that was clean and
upscale with a funny city twist…about a week later…he called me and he
was this singer on MCA…and he said, “Yeah I just ran into this dude Mark
Regev who’s Russell Simmons’s partner and they wanna
start a new clothes company and they wanted to talk to us about doing
design so we met with them and they were like, “Yeah we wanna do this
company and we wanna call it ‘Phat’ “and then automatically at that
time the biggest thing was Polo Country and everybody had this real rustic
look and so I was like, “Polo Country…Phat…that’s kinda corny”
because you should just call yourself fresh or dope or cool gear or
something like…that’s not gonna be in slang-wise for that long so I
was like, “Let’s call it Phat Farm” and that was the birth of Phat
Farm and we immediately got hired as the first designers…
