HARRI

Interview by Filep Motwary

Harikrishnan Keezhathil Surendran Pillai, otherwise known as Harri, was born in Kerala where he grew up with no exposure to the fashion industry. In 2013, he got into the London College of Fashion by accident while accompanying his best friend for her interviews. Fast forward to today, and now he makes balloon pants for a living, blending Indian savoir-faire into his menswear couture-like collections. His creations reflect a contrast and larger-than-life proportions, like those of bodybuilders, shifting between textiles made of wood to performance sculptures and combining references as diverse as Bauhaus, surrealism, and camp. By studying different forms and materials, Harri composes and reconfigures them with ease while he focuses on the duality between the notion of clothing as a mimetic practice and art.

FILEP MOTWARY: Your SS23 collection raises the question: “What do we call clothes that aren’t clothes as we know them?”

HARRI: I grew up in a place where the concept of clothing is quite different. I am from Kerala, which is in the south of India. In the village I come from, the concept of clothing is completely different there. There’s no concept of a jacket, there’s no concept of a puffer jacket. There’s only the concept of one single shirt and then a sarong, a long piece of cloth that we wrap around. There fashion or clothing isn’t a priority; it’s just a utility, nothing beyond that. For 18 to 20 years I lived in that place in that condition.
My thought process is I don’t see fashion as somebody would see it in Europe. I don’t have concepts of the 90s, 80s, 70s. I don’t have concepts of a well-made jacket. These are alien concepts. I had a hard time digesting this when I came to this country in 2018. It took me some time to complete my master’s for that reason. I had to study fashion history and erase everything I’d learned back in India. Now a lot of people tell me my work is original; maybe it’s because I don’t see clothing from a clothing point of view. I don’t know what kind of point of view it is!

FM: There are two types of bodies: the one that you grew up with and the body that you’re suggesting right now…

H: As a person, as a designer, I have a lot of avenues at my work. I work on multiple avenues. I work as a bespoke tailor. This is my part-time profession. I used to be a print designer, and now I don’t know what to call myself. What I do with my personal work, I don’t know what to call it. When I worked as a bespoke tailor or as a print designer, I’m very well aware of the body that I work with or the body that I work for because
then there’s a tradition to it, there’s a history to it, and it’s made for a purpose. I’ve worked in this field, in bespoke tailoring, tailoring and print designing for a long time. When I did my work, what I wanted was a break from that and to be completely different, without thinking about the body or anything else.!

I wanted to create things that people have never seen, and part of that desire comes from a point in my life when I was a bodybuilder and participated in bodybuilding competitions for five years with no other life than that.

FM: Do you consider functionality when you work?

H: I do yes. We can go crazy with a lot of things, but we are in the fashion industry. When I see my work and when I put it out, I do consider how people perceive it and I don’t want my creations to be perceived as alien objects or concepts. I do want people to resonate and relate to certain aspects of it. That’s the reason I apply functionality to my work. The tailoring is there too. I include pieces to make sure that my work is balanced and that it appeals to a wide range of people and not just artists or fashion students. Every time I make a new work I think of how I can make it accessible to a few more people around me.

FM: Why do we have this eternal need to reconstruct the body?

H: I can address this answer from two points of view. Being a bodybuilder, I was trying to break down my body and make it different, and I as a designer, where I’m not trying to break the body but enhance it. The body is like a mere canvas for me and it doesn’t serve any purpose beyond that. My pieces, if you take them out from the body, will still stand as standalone pieces. And I think they would make the same impact. The body is not limiting me in that sense; I don’t think of it and at the same time, I do. Maybe this comes from stories we’ve listened to in the past, from Greek mythology or Indian mythology.
It could be from pop culture. You never know what’s affecting your brain to think in a certain way!

FM: Clay is to a sculptor, what latex is to you. Tell me more about this material and why it’s important to you.

H: This material is important to me as it’s alien from India. When I started designing and when I started working on this project, when somebody said, “It’s too latex to me,” I wasn’t very sure—because it had a very sexual connotation. It had a kinky side to it. It’s always about material that you are scared of or shy away from. When I first approached latex, I was scared of ending up creating something sexual. Then, I started exploring it from a maker’s point of view in the sense that it’s a material that you can only use with your hands.
You have to cut it with your hands. You have to shape it with your hands. You have to stick it with your hands. You have to finish it with your hands. So the time in between the process became like therapy in the sense that you take this time, you cut the patterns, and you don’t need to go to a machinist to finish them off. If you are skilled enough, you can do it by yourself. So that gives me total control over the material. I don’t have to depend on anyone to make my pieces.

FM: Your collection looks very Bauhaus, very sexual too. At the same time it is very archaic this silhouette you suggest, goes back from 1300BC up until the 21st century…!

H: I made a research book where, among others, I placed the images of the Venus of Willendorf on the left and the right side shows Kim Kardashian!

FM: See, I told you!!

H: Yes! It’s not history repeating, but history rhymes. My whole research, my whole journey with this work is just to understand. There’s no conclusion here. There’s no right or wrong, there are no answers here. It’s just constantly questioning: why do we have this desire? Why do we have this? I was doing this with bodybuilding but now I’m doing it with whatever I’m practising with. So although I’m constantly questioning, I don’t have a definite answer for it, unfortunately.

FM: Are we conscious of what we see, buy, or wear?

H: I don’t think it matters in the end. A customer sees a piece, he sees the color first. When he sees color, when he touches the piece and takes the piece, he feels the material. The decision can be based on material. Once he likes the material, he checks the cut and the fit of the garment or the piece in front of him. If the fit and the cut are good, he then checks the price. If he can afford it, he’ll get it. This is a consumer brain. The story and the other things are considered after the fit.

FM: I have noticed that all your designs have a very small waist, which is also something we see throughout the history of fashion…!

H: It is something I’ve noticed. It is not on purpose. There’s a technical reason why I’m doing this because my trousers are filled with air, so you don’t have any control over where it’s going and how it’s going.
The challenge with my work is shaping that air with the panels I cut, with the latex and the shaping. My pattern-cutting skills help the air get inside and take shape. I do have a shape in my head of how the trousers should look: I don’t want this to be a blob or a bulk. I want it to nicely embrace the body and exaggerate the places I want to exaggerate. So the waist part, I’ve purposely cut it tight to make sure it’s not like a sudden blob, but there’s a nice transition from top to bottom. It isn’t about making the base smaller, it’s just about the transition, the smooth transition from the top to the bottom, that flow of it, that sweep of it to get that right.

FM: Tell me more about your experimentation and the ways you adapt body form perceptions, like optical illusions, for example.

H: What we see is not the right perspective of anything, to be honest. Everything is an optical illusion by default, everything we see. For that reason I studied optical aspects, just to see how people perceive things and to what level are they perceive them—is it right or wrong? Why do artists apply certain perspectives to their work? The best example is [Michelangelo’s] David, which is also discussed in my research book. There’s a golden ratio to it, it is a human being, but it is completely distorted in the perspective where the person who is looking at it is standing on the floor and looking up. So the artist was thinking about that and he carved that in a way that looks appealing from that point of view. So it serves a purpose.
And to employ that, the artist, Michelangelo has to have some optical knowledge about it. So I studied this just to know how these artists play with perspective. And this also goes back to my days as a bodybuilder, where you stand in front of a group of people and pose. You have to have the understanding that you are standing on top of a platform and you’re posing to people who are standing under you, or might be standing on the balcony, or who might be at eye level. So you, as a contender, have to have some understanding about what angles would look nice for you, your body, and the people sitting in front of you to give them the best shot. And you take months in front of the mirror to master those angles that you would look good at.!That’s just mastering the perception of optical illusion with your body in bodybuilding.

FM: How is India present in what you do today? Is it present at all?

H: India is present in multiple ways. India informs a lot of my material choices, which I was trying to overcome with latex, actually because coming from India, you wouldn’t touch latex. It [latex] is a place not for embroideries, [it’s] not a delicate fabric, [it’s] not cotton. A lot of designers who come out of India and are known outside India are known for their embroideries or delicate work.

FM: I’m interested to hear how you ended up in London.

H: All I know is I have a strong drive within me to do what I’m doing. For 18 years, I was in a village growing up. My dad used to be an artist, so I was interested in drawing figures. I was brought up in a temple neighborhood where you see statues, gods, and goddesses, everywhere, a religious place. Hindu goddesses are very exaggerated. It’s not something I’ve referenced in my work but I’m sure that this would have influenced the way I think about the body. One reason that I have symmetry in my work, which I’m now trying to break away from, is there’s a level of symmetry applied in those artworks of Indian sculptures and Indian gods and goddesses. It could be because the artist at that time was replicating it—they would paint it once and mirror it on the other side.!

FM: You have previously mentioned that you have two dads—is that correct?

H: Yes. It’s just how my family is: I have two dads and a mum living in the same house, as me and my sister. Ever since I opened my eyes, I have seen two dad figures and two man figures in my house, so I am used to that. It’s a normal thing for me. I call them both my dads. My mom is married to both of them and I never questioned it.

FM: Would you say you design clothes or something else? How would you want to be described?

H: As a maker I take pleasure in making things. To an extent, sometimes I don’t care what I make, but I do take a lot of pleasure in sitting and making things. And making from multiple perspectives, understanding people’s perspectives, and addressing those perspectives in my work. So you can best describe me as a maker. And when I find the next thing, I can tell—I know it.