Heritage
A house, in its own words
Hussein Chalayan's story begins in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he was born on August 12, 1970. His family relocated to London during his youth, a migration that would later inform his design philosophy. Before establishing his own company, Chalayan completed an internship with Savile Row tailor Timothy Everest, gaining exposure to traditional British tailoring. In 1994, he founded Cartesia Ltd., the parent company for his ready-to-wear line, which he initially called Hussein Chalayan. The label quickly distinguished itself through conceptual presentations, including performances exploring themes of migration, technology, and cultural identity. In 2010, he simplified the brand name to just Chalayan, marking a shift toward a more universal identity. The designer signed a worldwide manufacturing and distribution license with Spanish beauty group Puig for his first fragrance, a deal brokered in Barcelona that positioned the fragrance within Puig's portfolio of fashion-linked scents. Before the Airborne launch, Chalayan had experimented with fragrance through limited editions, including a 2005 piece as part of the Curated by Colette collection, though this remained a singular exploration until the Comme des Garçons collaboration. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, where pieces from his archive have been acquired for permanent collection. The designer has discussed his interest in family heritage and DNA in interviews with AnOther Magazine, suggesting ongoing engagement with questions of identity and origin that inform his broader practice. Chalayan's approach to fashion resists easy categorization. He describes himself as working across fashion, design, and technology, with projects that often extend beyond clothing into performance, film, and installation. His collections tend to begin with conceptual frameworks rather than fabric selections, with garments serving as vehicles for ideas about movement, transformation, and cultural displacement. This intellectual foundation informed the development of Airborne. The fragrance emerged from an existing creative framework, the 2007 winter collection titled Airborne, which explored themes of travel and displacement. Rather than commissioning a fragrance to extend a brand, Chalayan translated an already-developed conceptual work into a different medium. The scent, described as an ode to his journeys from Cyprus to London, functions as olfactory autobiography, mapping personal geography onto olfactory notes. This approach reflects a broader philosophy of integrated practice, where different creative disciplines inform one another rather than existing in isolation. The collaboration with Comme des Garçons brought like-minded partners who understood conceptual fragrance-making, allowing the project to maintain integrity rather than becoming a commercial exercise. For Chalayan, fragrance represents another dimension of his exploration of how objects and experiences carry meaning beyond their immediate function.