Conversations | Editor and Stylist, Dal Chodha
Image by Williem Jaspert
London based freelance writer Dal Chodha is the editor of non-seasonal fashion journal, Archivist. He contributes to various international titles and keeps the magazine going on the side. Chodha’s writings are questioning in nature; according to him, the Archivist functions “in a funny niche, between a fashion magazine and an academic journal” whose point is to be “anti-content.”
Journey since CSM
I have friends who are much more successful in their work than I am, but this also depends on how you define ‘success’. To me, it is freedom. The one thing that an education like mine has given me is that, I’ve learnt to be incredibly selfish –creatively, I mean. This doesn't indicate that I'm not able to collaborate with other people; what it means is that I think of the creativity first – instead of money first (which is what the whole world seems to be considering before anything else). The first consideration for me is the kind of creative muscle I’ll get to flex with any project under consideration. I mean, I'm still incredibly naïve -- which I think is a benefit for anyone in the creative industries -- because without that naïveté, a certain charm is missing.
Ever since I was maybe a year old, I was drawing clothes. My bedroom was covered in designs. My parents still have those sketches and drawings at home. I was in fashion. I don't know where this came from; there's been no epiphany, and my family’s had no connection whatsoever with fashion.
And then it's really the usual story of having good teachers who actually knew what they were talking about. On the foundation course, I was exposed to everything related to a career in fashion. At that time, it was the only course on the subject -- if you wanted to learn about fashion, you took the course.
I tend not to agonize too much over where I am, or what I'm doing, because then I'll start finding problems and things that I would wish to change. And my focus would shift to things that are less important.
Pre and Post Digital
In the pre-digital age, we paid attention to our surroundings and made sure that they changed often. Our surroundings change in the post-digital age too, but not necessarily in a physical sense. I think that my peers and I at that time (2001 -- 2006) in London used to be more physically present. We were in Soho. The campus was incredibly vibrant, and there were lots of things happening in the city. It wasn’t bulldozed down like it is now. Pockets of ugliness still existed, alongside things that were just wrong, and you could see and meet a lot of eccentric characters. Now a lot of those people have been pushed out of the city, or they've been moved, or they're unable to stay in the city any more. There's been a kind of general ‘tidy up’, if you like, of what you can see and what you can do. In those times, Fashion Communication for us was what people wore on the streets, the kind of music we listened to, the clubs we went to, and the conversations we may have had.
I think anyone complaining about the internet is simply not a part of the conversation, you know. I think it's incredible that there’s this whole wealth of information, and the real worry is that it’s overwhelming. For someone of my generation, it’s thrilling. The fact that we can look at what people are doing on the streets of Bombay or in Brazil at the same time, and that we can do it right away, is incredibly powerful. I think that if you haven't been given the skills to search and research and look and edit - which you aren’t actually being encouraged to cultivate because of the ease with which information is coming at you - if you can't filter that information -- then there's a problem. I think what's happening is that we're not encouraging people to search or stop and think. You're kind of in this tidal wave, and that's where the issue is, not with the medium. The internet is incredible, but I do wonder if it is encouraging us all to maybe look the same and think in the same ways. I don't know whether that's a positive thing.
Process of Curation
It's always about thinking about your reader and who you’re going to interact with. The things that I work on have lots of different audiences, and I think that's why maybe I’m fulfilled with my work. I know that the reader is reading, and getting something from it. Often I'm not talking about fashion to people in fashion; I’m talking fashion to people who are interested just as much in the design process of a chair or a plate. The challenge here is much more exciting.
If I were to write for a more commercial magazine -- commercial and widely available -- it would have been driven mostly by its function. But if I'm doing something for the Archivist, and writing a kind of think piece for ModernMatter, I have the opportunity to be much, much more conceptual in my thinking. Maybe only one hundred people will read it, but I know that those 100 people will actually get something from it. Every single person in the world doesn’t have to care about what I care about, which is the opposite of what culture seems to be about right now (with Twitter and all of those things that I'm actively engaged with myself). Again, with these things, you need to teach yourself how to use them, because otherwise, very quickly, we can just become a big echo chamber of somebody else's ideas. So I'm just really confident in the work that I do, and happy if I know that twenty people are seeing it and enjoying it, rather than thinking that every single person who reads my work needs to change their minds and agree with me. I'm not looking to make people agree with me; I'm looking for people to share something with.
Also, once you start growing, you have to start making very practical decisions as well. Everything I'm saying may sound very idealistic. Don't get me wrong -- there are other things I do to make sure that my rent is covered. And sadly, if I need to ensure that I have a roof over my head, it's not always possible to work in the way that I'm describing. There will be moments when you will have to readjust your thinking and be flexible, but if you're smart about it, you can still find something in a commercial project that ticks the boxes for you both financially and otherwise.
Because the fashion industry has been a playground for the privileged for so long that I think people still assume it's like that. I think that in certain areas -- yes it is -- but there are so many different ways of promoting and communicating these days that don't require you to necessarily have privilege (whatever you think that word means to you). I think that what's really exciting about today is that, anybody with a phone can be a publisher. But of course, therein lies the risk. Without any sort of training or any sense of how many people you're influencing, it can get tricky. We've all seen famous people make mistakes because they have said what they thought, and they’re gone now, because today you're not allowed to think certain things. I think people should be allowed to think whatever they want to. We all have the privilege to disagree with others. But now everybody is scared to actually say what they really think, so that's why you have watered-down journalistic voices in fashion and the arts. That's where you have everybody playing it safe. And that has nothing to do with my education or my belief system or why I wanted to get into this in the first place.
One’s own projects vs. Freelancing
Everybody works differently. I have colleagues, for instance, who thrive on being really busy and love having 10-15 things on at a single moment. And I know people who will collapse under that kind of pressure. I'm somewhere in between. I like to be doing a couple of things simultaneously. I'm not very good at taking a break, and that's not because I'm a workaholic, but just because I'm in love with what I do. The only kind of holiday I can imagine is one where I’m outside in nature -- either looking at the mountains or the sea -- and there’s nothing else around. Because I’ve seen that if I'm in a city and there's a gallery nearby or a nice shop, very naturally I’m pulled into making connections and doing things. A rule of thumb is, when I go on holiday, I don't want to see anything that I would wish to photograph. I don't want any culture. Therein lies the challenge.
I repeat myself often and I'm really conscious of that. I don't always want to have the same opinions. I don't think any of us should always have the same opinions. We’re always growing and learning, aren’t we?
For example, for a long time, I’ve had a very, very empty Instagram. This account is four weeks old. Before that, I had another account under a different name, which had a very specific function, because it was for the students and the alumni of an undergraduate course I was running. It had a reason for existing. I don’t really like the platform, but I understand that it is a communication tool. I joined because I realized that I was going on trips and meeting amazing people with whom I had no way of communicating, other than getting their phone number or email address. I was the one person in the room without an Instagram, and therefore unable to send a direct message to someone I’d just met if I wanted to keep in touch. I was rather formal, and hadn’t really come around to the casual conversations being forged between people nowadays. So I started using Instagram -- mainly as a messaging tool -- because there are people I want to meet, and there are people I want to interact with in a less formal way. That's me learning. That's me kind of saying, “Okay fine, I'll just -- you know -- get with it.”
This totally contradicts things I’ve said before, and that's embarrassing. But as I said, your moods change. You keep on changing and learning. I tweet a lot, partly because I have to use words and edit what I am thinking into phrases. I enjoy this because, here, I’m essentially writing.
Indian Connect
My connection to India is, I guess, slightly refracted, because my parents grew up in Kenya. They had no real connection to India in that way as a real, physical place. We had very distant family that lived there, and still do. We don't really get to meet much. The first time I visited India, I was nine. It was a family holiday, and we spent two weeks being tourists, seeing the Taj Mahal and visiting the Golden Temple. We had gone to attend a wedding, and ended up staying in lots of different places in Delhi and Punjab. I remember actively noticing at the age of nine that my parents disliked it. They just didn't like India. That was a weird feeling because, as children, my sister (who was 12 or 13 at the time) and I loved it. Because, of course, it’s amazing. It was the early ‘90s. And it was wild! Having grown up in a pretty generic British town, it was incredible. But I clearly remember my parents really not enjoying it. We went again in 2004, when we needed to go shopping for my sister's wedding in the usual British-Asian tradition. Again I found it fascinating that as a British-Asian, where you are British more than anything else, these things still just kind of have a hold on you when it comes to a wedding. We were relatively so new to the place, but we still did our shopping like everybody else does it. It was just that my parents turned it into a holiday. So it was a holiday with shopping for my sister's wedding. I found all of it exciting again -- going to the tailor, getting things made, and all of that. Then I went for the third and final time in 2013. I was asked by Burberry to find a local photographer in Delhi and Bombay, to shoot people on the streets wearing their classic trench coats as part of their “Art Of The Trench” campaign, which was happening to celebrate the opening of a new store in Gurgaon. I went on to do this project in Brazil and Chicago too. But the first one was in India. That was when I went to India as a young man for work and that experience was completely different from the earlier ones, because I was working for a luxury brand and staying in nice hotels and that was weird because, you know, I think that's why India is so fascinating. I remember being in my bath at the Four Seasons, looking out from the hotel and seeing poverty you shouldn't be seeing anywhere in the world. Fashion has taken me to all these places, and what is becoming increasingly interesting is that, we have a very narrow view of other places, you know. It's like, okay, this is what India is like. We are quick to believe what we have been told by the BBC.
London has become saturated, stagnant, too expensive, too uninspiring. You know, I find myself wondering that, if I were 18 or 19 today and just finishing my degree, would I stay here? I mean, London is not like England. It's very, very different. London is another country in itself. Everybody here is from somewhere else, and that's incredibly freeing. But now someone is deciding to make the buildings and the cultural institutions super generic, in order to meet all kinds of different needs, so that anyone from any country could be happy here. The joy that lies in the differences between us has been exploited as an opportunity to flatten us. We've almost let go of any sort of identity for fear of upsetting anybody. I guess what's happening right now in culture is a kind of re-compartmentalizing of people’s faces -- so I’m brown and I’m from here and I speak these languages -- rather than what it used to be. Again, in my naïveté -- and understand that this is naïve -- I'm just whatever I am. And that’s always been the essence of my relationship with India. I’ve not felt longing or a sense of being comfortable or uncomfortable. I've never really had any of those issues.
Material culture and Identity
There's this amazing detail that I think happened maybe 15-20 years ago. One thing that I’m fascinated about is what people’s interiors look like, esp. the interiors of the homes of people who are first or second generation immigrants. The Indian elements come in when you're in the kitchen. In my family, we’ve never had those steel or metal plates and cups, or those glasses for having tea that my aunts and uncles did, but they are recognizable, archetypal Indian things. And from speaking to my students whose parents came to the UK via Africa or the Caribbean, they had things similar to what we had in our home from Kenya. The same zebra-covered drum tables, the same bronze artworks and the same shell picture-frames.
I remember my parents decorating the house, and in the process, they got rid of all of this stuff. This was part of the New Labour era -- the establishment of the aspirational middle classes -- and so of course, we all wanted new things. The walls became Magnolia, the sofas became really big and fat. And all of a sudden, every middle-class British-Asian living room across the UK just became entirely composed of a huge television and a giant sofa that was too big for the room. And maybe one or two pictures – that was it. I think a lot of design that we surround ourselves with is taste first, and tastes are sort of learnt, and habits are built. So you just buy what you know. And I think there was a lot of that back then. That's why every single family had the same table in the 1980s. But there was a real stripping of some of those ethnic elements. My parents have lived here for so long that their association with India, and definitely Kenya, has become pretty distant.
Again, my sister's wedding was quite a pivotal event. There were these moments when we had to sing all these songs, and obviously, my mom didn't know a word of it. She told me, “I hadn’t known that we would be doing all of this. I hadn't done it myself when I got married to your dad, back in 1978. And here we are, doing it.”
I think a lot of it is about fitting in. And of course, if you're moving to a new country, you want to fit in. And I think people from the Indian subcontinent have always been very good at fitting in. They’re very adaptable. I remember how my dad cut his hair and stopped wearing a turban when he moved to Holland in 1977. I think that now this would be considered as a kind of awful micro-aggression, or people might say that he had to lose his culture to fit in. But I think that their generation have been very strong, very adaptable. He said that it made his life easier -- that people stopped asking him any questions, or staring at him in a funny way. The things that I'm talking about are material things, and in that context, what he said was, “But the paag on my head is not what makes me Sikh anyway.”
He started wearing it again when he moved to the UK in 1979. I remember when we used to travel together as a family, he loved seeing another Punjabi guy on the plane. It was guaranteed that they would strike up a conversation. And my sister and I would just die in our seats. Why would he want to talk to strangers! But I understand now that it is a kind of partnership, a signal. Even if I don't know who you are, there's going to be something that we understand about each other.
Independent journalism
I look at everything and I think that too many people are in one area of publishing. They feel very good about themselves too, because they read this one particular newspaper, and this one particular fashion and art magazine, and they listen to these same radio stations and these podcasts, and they only buy their food from one shop. Whereas I read as many newspapers as I can see and find. I don't really read The Daily Mail because, even without reading, I can guess what their take on something will be. I read as many fashion magazines as I can get my hands on. I don’t really buy too many fashion magazines anymore because, as I said earlier, just a fashion magazine per se doesn't appeal to me. I'm not interested in any one subject out of context. I tend to find subjects that the magazines have a world around. This has been an issue with the world of fashion for a long time – the fact that it's been in this gossamer bubble. Actually there's no point in getting excited about it. Take a handbag, -- an amazing thing of woven leather -- a beautiful masterpiece. But you don't see it in context if you don't see it on the street or on the table in a cafe, or on somebody’s shoulder – it is just a pointless, static object then. Many independent magazines have had to sell messages over and over and over again. Some of them do better than the others, but that's just not promising. It's tricky.
I don't think anyone is ever totally independent. I think that even if one person is reading what you've done, then you need to step up to being an editor and think about what that means, and recognize the influence that you can have on an individual or a wider group of people. We have all been encouraged to be very, very, very cynical about the influencers you asked about. And I don't think that's fair, because I think they're just trying to make a living, you know, and if you have so much confidence and you feel like you look great, so what? Share it. I think that our brains are just so full of stuff like that, and there’s not enough of the deeper stuff.
For me, I don't really have the time to fill it with all that stuff. It's just not relevant to me. So rather than getting upset about it, I just moved away. It takes up a lot of energy and it’s difficult to do. Because, you know, you overwhelm yourself and people give you 10 things that you have to go and see. Maybe only half of them are relevant or interesting. A lot of them are just pastimes for culturally savvy people. I don't need to see this exhibition that I have no interest in, over and over and over again as a story. And I've decided not to post regularly, because I don’t need to, right? I think it was Canon who designed this digital camera with a GPS setting in it that didn't allow you to take a picture that had been over-photographed. So, for example, if you were in the Taj Mahal compound, and were standing there at the same point where everybody generally stood, it just wouldn’t capture the picture. It would basically say that these pictures exist in too many numbers in the world for us to go and take another one. And that's what I'm really fascinated by -- this idea of actually knowing that no one needs my picture of this shoe or painting. That better photographers have taken pictures of this before. Yeah, I can probably relax and enjoy it, and don’t have to tell everybody about it by sending them this photo.
Revisiting tradition, creating contemporary meanings
Tradition -- our past -- is very important. Being an archivist is all about old things, but looking at them with new eyes. I'm all about that. If we look at everything that's going on socially or politically now, I feel that maybe we just haven't learned from history. And in terms of design, I think that there's a tendency of using tradition as a cushion for bad design. It's harder and more expensive to innovate than to just revamp something. Some traditions are really, really important, and intrinsic to moments in time or to groups of people who maybe don't exist anymore. That's where tradition began.
Sustainability
On a flight recently, when I asked for a cup of tea, I was given this whole paraphernalia -- a tissue, a plastic bag, a spoon and sugar -- without asking for it. I didn't need the sugar, the tissue, or the spoon. The attendant was really pleased that I told her to keep it back. It's just like the small soaps they provide in hotels, you know, where we get a whole lot of soap even if we’re staying for maybe two nights. It’s those kinds of things. These are small things, but maybe changing them can bring a big change.
I think everyone's just trying to get an understanding of the word sustainability -- trying to survive while trying to get through feeding themselves and their families or whatever we can afford. And I feel really sad that this extra pressure now.
I recently executed a project with Roker, a shoe brand. They have a tiny little workshop on Hackney Road. I was really fascinated when I discovered the workshop. They are actually making every single component in the centre of London -- in east London. That's super rare. So in that way, that's changed, I think, from a fashion point of view. I don't really wear anything or buy clothes from people who cannot explain the supply chain to me. I make sure I know who made every single piece of clothing that I wear. And I can very easily find out where the fabric came from and where it is going. I don't really engage with things that hold onto their anonymity.
Culture-Inspired Design/Diversity in London
I love London. It is a great place to study art and borrow things from different cultures. You use them, you update them. Rethink them! I think that's incredibly powerful.