Nasir Mazhar

"I try to create a world for myself, but I know real life subconsciously seeps in and has its effect," declares Nasir Mazhar, currently the brightest star in London's galaxy of young designer talent, and the creator of the spiked headguard that Madonna sported on her Dazed & Confused cover shot and the Orb headgear that Lady Gaga rocked on the cover of V Magazine and in her Bad Romance video. The 25-year-old headgear designer started out as a hair-stylist with Vidal Sassoon before turning to theatrical design to fulfil his desire to work in a more highly conceptualised way.

His work ethic is as idiosyncratic as his personal aesthetic. Mazhar claims his main inspiration is the city he lives and works in, but he likes to weave stories for his pieces.

Mazhar's blurring of the arcane and the modern comes together in a collection that swoops from dramatically draped medieval hennins and crimson cardinal hats, to Hannibal Lecter-esque muzzle masks and nuclear decontamination hoods and visors. That presentation marked him out as part of an upsurge of creativity and methodology on the East End design scene that has eschewed the "street style" and "hipster" mentality, which has been so prominent on the Hoxton circuit, for something more fundamentally artisanal.

via Independent UK