When I think of Hala Moawad, she is in a nightclub of my mind, riding a mechanical bull or smoking a cigarette deep in conversation, peppering her language – French, English, Arabic, Portuguese – with hordes of brefs and du coups. As the designer and creator of the leather, suede and denim brand Momma’s Blues, du coup sums up Hala and her designs perfectly; designs which seem to issue direct from her subconscious, coming at you all at once, in a single blow.
Hala is Lebanese but now lives in Paris. We became friends in 2019, on a mountainside overlooking Beirut from which it had been bombarded by Syrian troops during the civil war. Last summer, in the wake of the terrible explosion at the city’s dock, Hala designed a motorcycle jacket that she sold to raise funds for NGOs providing relief to those affected by the disaster. The jacket was printed with an image of three women in bikinis superimposed upon flames, with the phrase “So what do you think will happen tomorrow?” in Arabic.
Momma’s Blues specialises in jackets, tops, trousers and skirts formed from upcycled leather, suede and denim. Each piece – used jackets and trousers refashioned into modern cuts, tops and skirts made from second-hand stuff – is emblazoned with one-off insignias created by Hala and her assistant from her studio on Paris’s Avenue Daumesnil. The garments rise, phoenix-like from piles of scraps and leather off-cuts. She has found them scouring markets for second-hand jackets in large warehouses outside of Paris from which the city’s vintage stores also source their wares.
Her designs form a phantasmagoric theatre of symbols: marine creatures and winged horses, US flags and Japanese manga, horses and their cowboys, lips and aliens, flowers and insects, skeletal hands and clawed hands, bears, rodents flanked by floating incisors, women tangled in tentacles, beetles and flames, the Santa Maria of Guadelupe, petits pois, ghouls and geishas and ghosts.
The images come, Hala says, from her love of movies, her love of creating worlds within worlds. Growing up in Brazil after her family left Lebanon in the 1980s, one of her early loves was the children’s presenter Xuxa. Her daily show on morning TV, where she would dance in dayglo Lycra for hordes of admiring kids, was one of Hala’s favourites. “Her style was insane,” Hala says. “She would wear mini shorts with sky-high boots and crazy colours and I was eight years old going, oh my god, I want to be dressed like that.”
The idea for Momma’s Blues took form in 2013, in her friend Delphine Delafon’s kitchen, after Hala began playing with the offcuts from handbags that Delphine was making. She began to fashion them into little cutout Elvises. A year later, she was working as a stylist at L’Officiel and was struck by the quantity of identikit clothing – and how wasteful it was. A brand might produce 100,000 white T-shirts and burn half of them if they didn’t sell. “Madness,” she says.
The word “upcycle” hadn’t yet entered the broader fashion lexicon, but Hala had already started to think about what she could do to buck the fashion wastage around her. She asked Delphine to pay her in scraps of leather whenever she worked for her brand. “I didn’t do much with them; I didn’t know how to approach the whole thing.” Besides, she says, she had no means by which to finance the operation.
A year after her initial experimentation, Hala decorated a jacket with octopuses for a close friend; someone saw it and commissioned one for themselves. Things changed quickly. Her work became a byword for a certain brand of Parisian cool, and the orders started flowing in. Momma’s Blues was born – and in homage to its roots, octopuses still feature heavily in Hala’s visual repertoire.
The brand name references outlaw country virtuoso Townes Van Zandt’s 1971 album Delta Momma Blues. It’s appropriate for the label’s 1970s renegade spirit, fused with a 2021 environmentally conscious backbone. “The leather I use comes from scraps that factories don’t want. I have big brands sending me all the leather that they don’t use.” Hala and her assistant cut it into symbols that are then stitched to the clothing; she will alter the clothes to fit her clients, but not change much else. As someone who was upcycling before it became synonymous with of-the-moment clothing, Hala says, “It is a trend, but big brands are rethinking fashion, and that can only be a good thing.”
Much to Hala’s surprise, the coronavirus pandemic has seen an uptick in orders. She thinks it’s because people have had more time to scroll social media and discover her work. When I recently visited Hala’s studio in Paris, she had begun creating pieces for a collaboration with Selfridges.
I was visiting Hala because I had commissioned a jacket inspired by the cover of Ziad Rahbani’s 1984 album Houdou Nisbi. The cut of the finished thing reminded me of the muted leather coats sported by young men when the weather gets cold in Beirut, but the back glisters with colour and artifice. And underneath all this, there’s something hopeful about Hala’s work, something future-looking in a world of waste and atom bombs and seals choking on plastic knick-knacks. The jacket holds you tight, and as Townes Van Zandt put it: “If you hold me tight, it’s gonna be all right. Mama, chase my blues away.”
