Osman Yousefzada was born in to Afghan/Pakistani parents in Birmingham, England in 1977. He studied fashion at Central Saint Martins, and after opening his own eponymous fashion label, he expanded into the arts more widely, exhibiting works at Ikon Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, and in partnership with the V&A.
Artist, writer, social activist, and fashion designer, Osman Yousefzada was born to a Pakistani father and Afghan mother in Birmingham, England in 1977. Both parents came from ‘humble rural areas’ in their home countries and moved to the UK in the early 1970s (Maisey, 2021). Yousefzada grew up in a conservative, tightly woven Pashtun community in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. Style and creativity were inherent to him, his father being a carpenter and his mother a tailor, running a dress-making business. He later studied Anthropology at SOAS University of London, followed by a Fashion course at Central Saint Martins (part of UAL, University of the arts London), and then an MPhil at the University of Cambridge (Langley, 2019).
Finding that fashion was his calling, Yousefzada eventually launched his eponymous label, Osman, in 2008, forging a niche in luxury womenswear with an intellectual approach to design, producing clothes worn by celebrities including Lady Gaga and Lupita Nyong’o (Watkins and Yousefzada, 2022). The label ‘proudly represents the empowerment of women, sustainable tailoring, diversity, inclusivity and champions the evolving BI/POC movement’, the Osman website states. The collections ‘carry a balance of organic to Last Yards fabrics’, and ‘enlist the expertise of Indian artisan communities’ (Osman London). It was the singer Beyoncé who put his ‘emerging fashion label on the map’, Yousefzada claimed, wearing an Osman jumpsuit to the 2013 Grammys and generating a whirlwind of interest. Despite his success, it was after this occasion that Yousefzada was placed under lengthy examination by an immigration officer on his way to sell his new collection in Paris, of which he wrote in the Guardian that ‘the colour of my skin and my Muslim name was used to assess the level of risk I posed to society’ (Yousefzada, 2020). In 2016 he won the award for Outstanding Achievement in Art & Design at the sixth Asian Awards.
From 2013, Yousefzada expanded his practice into the visual arts space with a biannual arts-fashion journal, The Collective. He held his first solo exhibition at the critically acclaimed Birmingham contemporary art space, Ikon Gallery, Being Somewhere Else, in 2018. The exhibition was created to demonstrate the inequalities in the contemporary fashion world, as well as exploring marginalized voices and experiences within migration. A tent-like structure covered in delicate hand-sewn embroidery was placed adjacent to a recreation of an ‘immigrant’s bedroom’ inspired by his Afghan/Pakistani family’s experiences, filled with furniture and decoration signifying cultural displacement (Watkins, 2018). Later, for the Whitechapel Gallery’s spring 2020 exhibition, Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, Yousefzada broadcast a short film about garment workers in Bangladesh titled Her Dreams Are Bigger; ‘prompted by the issue that hundreds of thousands of garment workers are producing clothes for faceless customers’ (Pithers, 2020). In 2022, three site-specific works entitled Osman Yousefzada: What Is Seen And What Is Not were shown across three locations in South Kensington, a project commissioned by the British Council in partnership with the V&A and the Pakistan High Commission as part of the British Council’s festival season, Pakistan/UK: New Perspectives – The 75th Anniversary of Pakistan’s Independence. Yousefzada created handcrafted textiles, wrapped objects, and seating interventions, showcasing the traditional and contemporary techniques of both the Pakistani and European workshop (Graham, 2022).
Osman Yousefzada lives and works in London. His work is not yet held in any UK public collections. He published a memoir of his childhood in Birmingham, The Go-Between: A Memoir of Growing Up Between Different Worlds with Canongate in 2022. The book received critical acclaim, hailed by Stephen Fry as ‘one of the great childhood memoirs’ (Smith, 2022).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Osman Yousefzada]
Publications related to [Osman Yousefzada] in the Ben Uri Library