The London-based designer talks the ’90s rave scene, his own masked uniform, and how upcycling is a form of rebellion.
Textile artist and fashion designer Noki sees no difference between the human body and a canvas. The iconic (and eccentric) designer is known for ripping up old clothes, mashing up the pieces, and creating something new, something recycled, and something that leaves viewers with questions. “I want people to feel an overfamiliarity with what they are looking at, yet they are really rather unsure about what they are looking at, therefore always questioning why they are feeling an inner contentment,” says Noki over email to Mission.
Noki is no newbie when it comes to creating sustainable fashion. He is considered an upcycling trailblazer, having been reviving textiles for over 20 years. It all started in ’90s London; Noki was involved in the rave scene, weaving punk into everything he created. He explains, “when you live by the rave mashup, you die by the rave mashup…it was a way to reject the ’90s while the ’90s was still going on.” And the designer still lives by the rave mashup, creating the same punk-inspired, rebellious clothing today as he did then. He has never been the kind of artist afraid of going against the status quo and is opening a design school, The Noki NESTT (Noki Education of Sustainable Textiles and Technology), in Brighton, England, to instill the same renegade thinking in the next generation. The school’s Instagram bio reads, “a new school for modernist indie thinking students into high fashion custom build design concepts.”
Noki’s creative inspiration has centered not only around rebellion but the rejection from society that often precedes it. Using discarded clothes, Noki embraces items someone has chosen to reject, reflecting the purpose behind his craft. “Learning the craft of collage drives my art narrative into the right imperfection. The human has decided to throw out and declare an imperfect garment for me to use now,” he explains. Someone declaring something waste grants Noki the opportunity to create. Noki has a personal motto, “rejection breeds reinvention.”
Noki’s own look is just as recognizable as his art. Never seen without a mask, Noki says his aesthetic is an important symbol of sustainability in the avant-garde fashion scene. “It represents awareness. It’s a creative solution in my art practice. That mask, created using a second-life T-shirt, stretched over your face can be easily identified and recreated, rebuilt in your bedroom, atelier, by anyone, youth or elder. It was my way of saying, ‘I’m getting my head around true sustainability.'”
Sustainability is intrinsically tied to his creative process. He considers landfill contents a source of inspiration. “This landfill stuff is a raw commodity and stuff we have already in abundance to create new ideas. It’s all a case of waste commodity and what can be done with it in the community.”
The Noki NESTT will continue to drive sustainability, custom creations, and reinvention. Noki is keenly interested in how modern times are inextricably tied to technology. “The last big migration was to the Americas; now it’s a tech migration onto the internet,” he explains. “The metaverse custom potential is perfect for the NESTT to investigate.” So while he hopes to integrate old-school rebellious thinking into his teachings, Noki will also use the NESTT to bring social disruptors into the tech-savvy future as his legacy continues to stray from the predictable.
Images courtesy of: Noki
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