Bangladeshi designer Rahemur Rahman on how his work with activism to make space for South Asia in British fashion

The designer speaks to Bazaar India about his childhood, his work as a freelance South Asian bridal designer, showcasing at LFW, and more.

Dec 02, 2024 | by Upasana Das

In a room plastered with dark floral print wallpaper, possibly peeled off by his younger siblings, a boy sits on a sofa too large for him. Holding his baby sister for the first time, a young Rahemur Rahman smiles, a pair of white wedges belonging to his mother peeking out demurely below his jeans. Throughout fashion school and while designing his first collection for London Fashion Week, Rahman would return to these family albums looking for patterns that defined what home meant to him.

“My work starts with activism,” says the designer, who, as the director of training and development at the British Bangladeshi Fashion Council (BBFC), mentors South Asian designers to survive in the industry. “From 2019, when I launched my brand at LFW, there hasn’t been another Bangladeshi person who’s gone on to LFW. I’m gonna make sure I’m not the last one.” Sitting in his alma mater, Central Saint Martins, as we speak, where he also teaches the BA Fashion students, he feels lucky for alot of things in life—he was lucky to receive the Erasmus fund to access an education at CSM and it was pure luck again when Sarah Mower spotted him, leading him to showcase at LFW, the first Bangladeshi designer to do so.

In his childhood three-bedroom apartment filled with nine siblings, he recalls a boiler room that had been transformed into a sewing room, where his father, who worked in the rag trade, sat stitching clothing scraps endlessly. This was not an unusual trade for many Bangladeshis living below the poverty line in East London.

“It was very normal to not have been on holiday with our families and have rice and curry everyday, because the idea of eating out wasn’t a thing,” he says. “I never really understood anything was different until I went to university.” Somewhere between playing with fabric scraps and his closeted teenage self “performing masculinity for the masses”, he enrolled in a youth arts programme by A Team Arts, which propelled him towards fashion.

He was working a retail job at Selfridges when Mower spotted a shoot by him, published online. It had been a couple of years since he graduated. “I came out as gay to my parents when I was 25, about to graduate,” he tells Bazaar India. “It was quite volatile—I was kicked out of my family home.” Although he could move in with his then partner, he had to give up design. “Fashion is very expensive, and you really need either a familial backer or a safety net,” he says. “Even if I lived with my family, they wouldn’t be able to give me that.”

Alongside, he was also freelancing as a South Asian bridal designer. “I would treat Selfridges like a sketchbook, playing dress-up. I wanted to do a shoot where I was fusing South Asian luxury with the UK luxury.” When Mower saw it, she messaged him on social media. “I met her. She remembered my collection—why didn’t I start a brand? I told her the barriers. She decided to assist and mentor me and connected me to the BBFC,” remembers Rahman. They seed-funded some of his debut collection.

Rahman’s father was nine when he immigrated to London, after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. The first time Rahman went to Bangladesh, he was 28, researching for his LFW show, holding dear all the family photographs he had swooped up before exiting his family.

“I was gonna work through these emotions by looking at patterns and textures in the photographs,” he adds. “I loved this shape that looked like a ’70s William Morris—the mixture of cultures suddenly connected. I would repeatedly draw this onion shape on a rooftop in Dhaka, at the Aranya head office.” The shape has now become a signature.

He had been introduced to Aranya, which creates clothes from natural dyes, during his mentorship, and they are still collaborators. “I was trying to push the craft I had seen in Bangladesh,” he says, “Politically, a lot of craftspeople were losing funding from NGOs.” Working post-Rana Plaza collapse, he alters what ‘Made in Bangladesh’ means to the industry. Now creating commission- based gender fluid pieces, he’s drifted away from the excess of luxury fashion, which happened while working at Louis Vuitton under Kim Jones. “I was designing a damier pattern using lizard skin in warm blue,” he recalls. “I chose one skin, and the rest went into the bin.” He’s comfortable letting his pieces ‘die’, as he adds a poplar seed to each garment, imagining the piece decomposing after being discarded, and nurturing a tree.

On that same trip, on Bangladeshi New Year, while walking in Ramna Park with flowers in his hair, he came upon a group of transwomen from the hijra community, and he started talking to them. “It would have been three years after I had been kicked out when I met the women,” he says, still not having reconnected with his family, “I just felt like home was with them as well.” While working with V&A for their ‘Fashioning Masculinities’ exhibition, he would visit their archives, wondering where the presence of the everyday lives of people without wealth was. So, for the 50th anniversary of the independence of Bangladesh, he worked with young Bangladeshis in London, to document their parents’ memories of the war and creating home anew, for an exhibition ‘My Home, My Bari’. He is now working on a documentary with four transwomen, following their lives in Bangladesh.

With clients like Riz Ahmed, Leo Kalyan, and Blair Imani, Rahman could easily veer into upholding the sacredness of his work as a designer, but rather sees his work as less of a designer, more of an artist. “I’m thinking of design beyond fashion. I basically watch the news a bit too much and think art can fix everything. I am delusional enough to think I can make a difference. Somehow, I kind of am,” he concludes.