FASHION'S FAVOURITE VANDAL

London-based artist Navinder Nangla is graffitiing his way into the heart of the global fashion scene through his cleverly misspelt works.

- DIVYA VENKATARAMAN

It was a Northampton garage leak that sent Navinder Nangla spinning into the stratosphere of the London fashion and art scenes. When his bibi’s shed, his makeshift studio, became unusable, he began looking for another canvas. He still needed to create but he couldn’t paint there anymore. So why not walls?

The British-Punjabi artist started tagging spaces outside fashion studios and PR agencies in London with a range of distinctively misspelt graphics: thick, bleeding lines reading ‘Fassion weak’, or ‘Fassion is my Pashion’, with red autocorrect-like squiggles under them. At the time, he was a stylist, constantly shuttling between his hometown and the city, ferrying samples back and forth from studios and shoots. He knew that people who mattered would walk by those agencies. And they did. “I had someone come up to me after a few seconds and say, ‘This is so cool,’” he tells me. “It was a lightbulb moment.”

Nangla is bubbling with energy over our video call as he talks about his work, his words tripping over themselves. It is infectious. We speak days before London Fashion Week, before he unveils the upcoming ‘fashion collection’ he has been teasing on social media for weeks. It will turn out, in his classic trickster modus operandi, to be a giant canvas printed with misspellings of iconic fashion names, rather than a showing of any actual garments. It pays homage, he says, not just to his ‘heroes’, but also to the technique of trompe l’oeil, beloved by some of his favourite designers. He grins and says, “Yeah, it’s a bit of a troll.”