Fashion can serve as a vehicle for cultural memory, identity, and reinterpretation. These designers each draw from personal or ancestral roots—whether South Asian, Afro-Caribbean, Chicano, American, or Japanese—to create work that reflects the nuances of heritage through contemporary design.
1. Ahluwalia
Ahluwalia, founded by Priya Ahluwalia in 2018, blends Nigerian and Indian cultural influences with contemporary London style. Originally focused on menswear, the brand has since expanded into womenswear, offering collections that reinterpret vintage sportswear and tailoring through a diasporic lens. Patterns and silhouettes often reflect archival textiles and family history, with a strong emphasis on sustainability and multicultural storytelling.
2. Wales Bonner
Wales Bonner, founded by Grace Wales Bonner, takes a scholarly approach to fashion rooted in her Jamaican-British background. Her collections explore Afro-Atlantic cultural expression through a blend of European tailoring and African-Caribbean aesthetics, often referencing historical texts, music, and spiritual practice. The result is a refined and poetic body of work that reflects on heritage, hybridity, and diasporic identity with quiet depth.
3. Willy Chavarria
Willy Chavarria’s work is grounded in his Chicano heritage and upbringing in California’s Central Valley. His collections draw from Latino subcultures, Catholic iconography, and the realities of immigrant labor in the U.S., expressed through oversized tailoring and emotionally charged presentations. By centering underrepresented identities in fashion, his work challenges mainstream ideas of masculinity and elevates everyday uniform codes into symbols of strength and dignity.
4. Bode
Bode, created by Emily Bode, focuses on American domestic history and family memory through the reuse of antique fabrics. Drawing on heirlooms and archival textiles—from quilts to table linens—her garments reframe craft as a form of narrative. Many pieces reference immigrant experiences, particularly in early 20th-century America, positioning clothing as a way to preserve generational stories and overlooked cultural practices.
5. Sasquatchfabrix.
Founded in 2003 by Daisuke Yokoyama and Katsuki Araki, Sasquatchfabrix. blends traditional Japanese motifs with contemporary streetwear aesthetics under the concept of “High Performance Vandalism.” The brand draws inspiration from various elements of Japanese culture, including folklore, historical garments, and subcultures, to create designs that are both avant-garde and rooted in tradition. Through this lens, Sasquatchfabrix. offers a distinctive perspective on Japanese identity, merging the past with the present in subtle, often symbolic ways.
