Take exquisite draping, a dedication to reducing waste, scientific formulation, and the face that haunts your nightmares dredged up from somewhere deep in your subconscious, and also you get Anika Leila. The designer is a recent Central Saint Martins graduate, who showed a set that might have been mistaken for a series of sleek, hyper-feminine red carpet pieces – at first glance a minimum of. A second, closer look revealed humanoid faces straining against the material from inside, very similar to the hand emerging from the TV in Poltergeist, and proved that Leila isn’t within the business of classic design. 

“I’ve at all times had a extremely big fascination with faces,” says the 23-year-old designer. “It’s probably because I even have bad eyesight, so when someone’s in front of me, I’ll analyse their face.” Throughout lockdown, Leila connected along with her wider family virtually, whom she says she knew little about having grown up in London. “Numerous them are creatives like me. I used to be inspired by a member of the family from where my dad’s family is from in Punjab who has history going back to tribes. He was capable of show me family history I didn’t know existed. It’s this whole idea of seeing someone for the primary time and being inspired by their face since it tells their history. Whether or not it’s a monster or a human, it’s at all times going to be a face.”

Alongside supplying inspiration for the faces that typify her work, Leila’s family provided a practical influence too, as they imparted their sewing skills on her. “Once I was younger my parents were super, super busy with work so me and my sister were left with my grandma, and he or she had an entire room dedicated to sewing. All the pieces she’s ever worn she’s made herself, and he or she at all times pushed the thought of organic methods of constructing clothes, like patterns and draping and even hand sewing. It’s a extremely big thing throughout the Indian community, especially as a lady, to be crafting your individual clothes. It’s a giant gesture of affection,” Leila says.

A connection to Southall through her sewing family meant Leila would often receive calls from fabric shop owners asking if she’d prefer to make use of unsellable fabrics. With a limited budget and bags of scrap fabric at her disposal, Leila developed a patchwork-like approach to construction, draping, hand-sewing, and tessellating scraps together; the resultant hanky hemlines and cut-outs sitting somewhere between Y2K-era It-girl and Nensi Dojaka.

Leila’s intuitive use of non-standard materials extends to her signature faces too. Her 3D sculpted pieces with their gapped teeth and bulging eyes are product of clay, while her prints are produced using expired make-up, collected from friends and social media followers. “I remember being really, really obsessive about YouTubers and influencers. It was blowing up and there have been so many individuals releasing make-up brands, and I used to be like ‘Oh my god, there’s gonna be a lot waste from this’,” Leila says. “It got to some extent where I used to be pondering if there was a lot make-up that wasn’t getting used, and it was being expired and thrown away, just give it over to me and I’ll see what I can do with it.”

Leila enlisted the assistance of her mum who asked her friends to filter their expired make-up. She also trawled local charity shops, discovering ill-thought out celebrity products languishing in stock rooms because they couldn’t be sold. Using mascaras, lip liners, foundations, eyeshadows, and blusher and applying it to the material as you’ll to your face, Leila created airbrush-like prints in blush pinks, wealthy reds, earthy browns, and aubergine purples. Mouths agape, eyes closed, proportions distorted, the source material is perhaps human, however the end result is unsettling and otherworldly. 

“I’ve at all times had a extremely big fascination with faces. It’s probably because I even have bad eyesight, so when someone’s in front of me, I’ll analyse their face” – Anika Leila

As arresting because the prints are, the thing is, once you get make-up in your clothes, you wash it off, so Leila set out to search out a strategy to make her prints wearable and everlasting. She sought advice from textile and print specialists, but initially found that any sealants she could make would should be chemical-heavy. Since she has MS, Leila says she pays particular attention to ingredients, actively attempting to improve her own health and the health of everyone round her. 

Finding the precise formulation has been a protracted means of trial and error over the course of nearly five years, but Leila, who initially planned to enter medicine, finally reached a non-toxic formulation she was pleased to use to clothes and wear next to her skin. With a novel product on her hands, she doesn’t share details of exactly how the sealant is formulated or what’s in it, but she has confidence in its ability to preserve her prints and make her pieces hand-washable. 

As her work is so rooted in her history and family – although she says they’re “scared” of her work and “don’t understand it”, which is probably going a well-recognized story for swathes of next generation creatives – putting it out into the world as a product was an exposing experience. “I lack a variety of emotion but then it’s all in my work, it’s too vulnerable in a way. Once I first began making tops [to sell] I remember feeling super emotionally attached to each print I made, but then seeing it on one other person was this insane euphoric feeling,” she says.

Despite discovering the enjoyment of sharing her work, Leila is in no rush to sell on a giant scale. She’s currently running limited restocks of her printed tie-back tops, and taking the time to experiment, explore latest ideas, and intern with designers who’ve an identical outlook on design. “I don’t even know what I mean once I say I’m working on my brand because I don’t even know what it’s,” she says. But in an industry that always takes probably the most creative graduates and crushes them with industrial demands, some ambiguity, space, and time will certainly serve Leila’s unconventional design process well.