custom house

A big hot stew.

We’re mostly known for ear-splitting gabber.

I met Nasir through friends that had interned for him originally, I think we actually met at Slimelight the first time, which is kind of embarrassing because I was definitely extremely mashed. Then when he was starting the Fanny T project and was scouting around for people to be involved, my name came up as a suggestion. So I took a suitcase of my wares to Forest Gate to show him and the rest is history.

I remember seeing it for the first time and losing my tiny mind. It was so exciting to have something like this in London again, like a little hub. I used to read stories of all the weird little boutiques there were in London from the 1970s to the 1990s, and gradually they all just died, as this city is slowly drained of any kind of culture because everyone is priced out. So to have this space where you’re kind of living what you read about in the past was ace. The dressing room had furry walls and the floor was a giant mirror. It was just mad.

There’s no set aesthetic at Fanny T, but what unites us all is the attitude we have towards work. We’re all really open to experimentation and we aren’t weighed down by perfectionism – it’s much more important to make something new and innovative and mad.

With Nasir as Big Mother Fanny, he respects and supports my “gold standard” sustainability stance through just being a “custom builder”. I have no designer patterns in my arsenal, just a custom-build process with landfill garments used to create my art style Noki Zines from. FT is frontline textile education. Fresh fashion narratives are being written by the FT crew, rules are being broken, new brands are being evolved. New journalists are seeing it and new consumers are wearing it.

Knowing Nasir as a person, we discuss further than fashion veneers – we both feel similar constraints about our creative endeavours, with our fashion assemblages expressing loudly this hate to love ratio. We don’t conform, but this does not mean we do not love; we have a creative solution to that inability to be controlled. We have both been burned out by the industry but we’re wise enough to step back and say, no, it was only a moment, it will not define us. It can be learned from, healed and re-engaged – with a better hindsight and a refined solution that can show those who judged just how wrong they were, and how better our creative process be channelled.

Sustainability is the new buzzword. I’m proud to be seen as a creative artist/forefather to the sustainable movement. There are plenty of others, like the HOBAC (House of Beauty and Culture), Conscious Earthwear, Katharine E Hamnett. Sustainability, through my textile choices, is the power behind Noki that has developed over my 27-year practice. It’s been a slow burner, I even feel like I take it for granted in a way, as it just has always been that way, creating my Noki art from sustainable branded textiles. I was only ever comfortable creating Noki from them, it gave me an inner rebellious peace.

Now unfortunately “vintage” has been weaponised by consumerism and the industry through fashion art directors and designers who only wish to gain commercially from easy nostalgic consumerism and played-out Pinterest cool nostalgia – which is the root of mass-market commercial design intentions. When nostalgic cool goes warm, it’s basically global warming as designed patterns of mass-produced destruction. There are basically greenwash agents at best, creating landfill trends and consumerist disinterest.

I can’t speak for more people. I think more people have too much say with opinions based on a fake existence gained by overstimulation through social media and being obsessively jealous about somebody else’s ability to just be creative. Hence I say we live in a “design for design’s sake” world. When you wear fake style, it rubs off as fake – it’s not necessarily the consumer’s fault, but it’s all about education. Fitting in is important to the commercial consumer market.

Simple – they turn up to have their minds opened and their bank accounts highly stimulated.

DIY culture is something I hugely appreciate and it’s what people should be doing. It’s not that massively commercial things can’t be good, but there’s a raw energy and charm to DIY culture. Commercial things can be interesting and can be good, but there are drawbacks – people have less creative freedom, there’s delays and meetings and middle-men. That takes away from the spontaneity of it. And that’s what makes Fantastic Toiles interesting.

It also means that pieces are inevitably one-offs. I’d like to make small runs of stuff, but it does change a lot. The thing about Fantastic Toiles is you’re supposed to be making pieces that are crazily interesting and wild and unique and that’s really the charm about it. Sometimes I sink hours into making a shirt and it’s great because I get to get completely lost in the creative process – it’s like a meditation in a way.

A Venetian Snares track or something from the Hair soundtrack.

There’s a tagline that’s been used that I think sums it up pretty well, something like: “A dressing-up box of rare oddities and a foray into fantastic and fabulous fashions.”

It’s a lot of work! But I love it.

I did fine art and history of art, starting in 2019 and ending in 2022. At the time I was far more keen on expressions that were outside of strict artzones like galleries, and patches have that portable nature, that detachment from a fixed point. They exist more accidentally, they make more of an encounter in their unexpectedness.

Each patch makes different bonds with different people and each patch can only have one owner. Some patches I’m really surprised that they get liked because I just made it and didn’t think any more about it. That’s probably the key, not thinking too much about what the appeal will be in the patch because then the patchmaking starts to turn itself inside out – which is the key that opens the door to intense corruption of the organ.

An inside-out bag, all the dust and fragments that isn’t meant to be there but always will be falling out and revealing itself. And you find that really special piece of paper you thought you lost, that fiver, the loose filter and the secret jewel, the passport and the Maoam, the wrapper and the ticket, and the loose change. The lock and the key, the rope and the hint, the old book and the loose tooth.

We have been brought together because we make resonant things. We aren’t CSM MA fashion class of 2084, we are Fantastic Toiles, we are the many. I like how complicated and unclear it is, because it’s also very simple. When you look at Toiles in a far perspective, each of us contribute to a rocky texture, a sandiness that rumbles and trickles.

It sets an example of what can be done by working together. It’s a node and there are other nodes similar to it, but they are rare by nature. Few and far between. I don’t know if there is enough of the essential nutrients for there to be many things like FT. I think they come from a minority/majority situation, and because the minority is small by nature it can get depleted by the big quite fast, whether that’s through exhaustion or aggravation or exorcism or excision or defection or distraction. It is always possible to defect and drift.