Abdul AbasiNew York-based fashion designer Abdul Abasi shares how his military background guides his brand’s futuristic approach to menswear.
Abdul AbasiNew York-based fashion designer Abdul Abasi shares how his military background guides his brand’s futuristic approach to menswear.
“I think intuition is such an important part of our lives. It’s about your gut feeling”
Inspiration can sometimes hit at the most unexpected moments. While stationed in the Netherlands with the US Army in his early 20s, fashion designer Abdul Abasi came to love the vibrant design and street style he saw during off-duty rambles around Amsterdam. In 2006, he traded his position as a NATO missile technician for a place at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and there he met classmate Greg Rosborough, who would later become his business partner. Now three years into his role as creative director of the duo’s own line, Abasi Rosborough, Abdul shares how his own ethos and the brand’s mission to modernize menswear is rooted in his military past.
—
Fashion is communication. Whether you’re a politician, a soldier or a chef, whatever you wear communicates an idea and speaks to a certain tribe or social construct you want to be a part of.
I was in the US military before moving to New York. One of the beautiful things about the military was that I got to travel a lot—I lived in the Netherlands, Korea and Germany—and was able to explore cities and see different cultures. On the clock, the military is about conformity and working together for a common goal, but as soon as you take off the uniform and get out and about, you’re just like any other civilian: And you want to look presentable in normal clothes.
I was stationed in the Netherlands for more than three years, and that’s where I picked up the bug for fashion. I really saw menswear there in a new light—in an artistic, irreverent sort of space, rather than just as a commercially driven idea.
The first real garment I designed and constructed was with the help of a bunch of middle-aged Dutch women. I had picked up a sewing machine in a local shop and had seen an ad for a sewing circle, so I used to drive into the countryside to sit with the women and learn how to sew. After attending a few classes, I drew a sort of cropped trench coat, and the woman heading the group helped me design it. I was so proud of it that when I went to my admissions interview at FIT, I brought that piece with me. It impressed the head of the menswear department, and he accepted me.
I graduated from FIT in 2008. I met Greg there, but it’s ironic, because we weren’t the best of friends in school—I was a little older, and I may have been a bit more of a loner. Out of school, both Greg and I were working for other designers. Although the experience was great, we both felt stifled by the fact that every time we wanted to design something, we had to look into an archive—to look at what had previously been done and reinterpret it.
Years later, we reconnected to tackle the idea of modernizing the men’s wardrobe. Greg and I are two sides of the same coin: He’s very pragmatic, a great leader, very organized and detail-oriented, whereas I’m a bit more spatial, intuitive and use abstract thinking.
When someone works with me, I want them to know that I take a holistic approach to everything. I think intuition is such an important part of our lives. It’s about your gut feeling: I don’t do anything I feel is unequivocally wrong or counter to my personality or my values. For example, Greg and I have certain dogmas behind our design ethos, and one of them is using natural fiber: We’re big proponents of using sustainable fabrics that are natural and biodegradable. Now we’re just trying to figure out how to integrate that with design items that are emotional and soulful.
In any sort of creative endeavor, it’s always good to have someone to challenge your ideas. Through defending our ideas, Greg and I are able to come up with the purest and strongest products. We really support each other and balance one another out. Fashion is a very tough industry, so it’s also good to have someone around who has your back—someone who supports you, has put in the same amount of work and sacrifice as you have and is willing to share the labor. We’ve sacrificed a lot to create our own business, and we’ve done things that many people have refused to do or are not able to do. I think that comes from my time in the military: The discipline and the attention to detail have served me well in fashion.
The military is also the biggest fashion reference ever, without a doubt: It never goes out of style. Every menswear garment is a derivative of it. I love the beauty of military design because function is paramount. In the military, I wasn’t so conditioned to look at that, but it has definitely subliminally seeped into the way I think. Abasi Rosborough is not overtly military in any respect, but it operates under the same principle: function first.
I’m very big into the ideology and theory behind design—the reasons we make things and why those things are well designed or not. I’m a student of design history; I enjoy researching da Vinci, the Bauhaus movement, Jean Prouvé and all those polymaths. What I love about the era preceding ours is that if you were a designer, you designed buildings as well as furniture—there was no categorization or specialization. You knew design through and through, and you could design anything.
Growing up, I felt like I could do anything that I wanted to do—I really didn’t feel limited by my race, gender or culture. My parents are Nigerian immigrants; they moved to the States around 40 years ago, and I was their first child born here. Typically, first-generation immigrants are kind of torn between two cultures: You have your mother tongue and your mother culture, and then you’re thrust into a totally different setting. But I was growing up in a very diverse neighborhood and didn’t have a sense of my race being lesser than anyone else’s. I think that allows me to navigate between different cultures now.
Today I live in Jackson Heights, Queens. It’s extremely diverse: There are more than 200 languages spoken in this area, and there are lots of restaurants that serve food from South India, Thailand, Tibet and Bengal. Greg lives in Brooklyn, where we also have our studio, and we make all our clothes in Manhattan’s Garment District. I’m in love with New York: So many things are possible here. For example, the fact that we can design and manufacture a collection in one city is quite amazing.
I love to go to the different galleries in Chelsea to see exhibitions—I find inspiration in art and in the processes that artists have, and I really try to utilize that in our fashion practice. Too many designers reference other fashion designers, and I don’t think you can bring anything new to the table that way. But if you can look at different processes—whether it’s those of sculptor Richard Serra or artist Douglas Wheeler—you can use the same sort of logic but implement it in a different context. There’s something fresh when you do that; art is an everlasting well of inspiration.
In the three years we’ve been running Abasi Rosborough, Greg and I have learned that we have to balance familiar items and emotional responses with design, forward-thinking and function. I think we’re at a good place now, and we’ve definitely developed our own handwriting.