Osman Yousefzada
(Picture: Dave Benett)DESIGNER and artist Osman Yousefzada says despite the progress the fashion industry has made on diversity, “I still code-switch” — a term for using a different way of speaking in different places.
Yousefzada, who began his career in 2008 and has had multiple shows at London Fashion Week, grew up in an impoverished area of Birmingham. His parents were both illiterate.
He said his visits to his mother, who died this year, had focused his thoughts. “It’s been really at the forefront of my mind where I go into this ghetto… [and] come back to London, a different world with celebrities and art shows,” he said.
Yousefzada’s new book, The Go-Between, has been hailed by Stephen Fry as “one of the great childhood memoirs”. The designer said: “When I was starting out... you [couldn’t] really talk about your background.”
He added that he even ran into difficulty when asking for more diverse models. “It was always like, ‘You’ve got to pay more because it’s much harder finding all those people that you want’”. He said being asked to pay more for diversity “actually seemed really quite mad”.
Yousefzada added of his book “it’s really all from the eyes of a child, looking out, looking at a world which is super messed up and layered and you don’t know where anything is.” He added that it features It’s basically like a migrant community who are super orthodox but they find themselves in this sort of crazy red light district area on the wrong side of the tracks”.
Evaristo’s heckling chapter
BERNARDINE EVARISTO had a past life as a heckler. In her early twenties, she and pals from drama school would descend on London’s theatres and start shouting. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” the Booker prize-winning author, left, explains. Instead, chances are they were yelling out “racist!” or “sexist!” And while she probably wouldn’t do the same now, she tells the New Yorker she has sympathy for those who get stuck in online. “We do need these people who will just lob a verbal hand grenade”. Boom.
Where to find Williamson fans ...
GAVIN WILLIAMSON is big in Somaliland — very big. It recently held a “Gavin Williamson Appreciation Day” for the Tory MP after he led a parliamentary debate about recognising the territory. It is currently a region of Somalia, but argues it should be an independent state. Williamson declined to say how he felt about being celebrated, but did tell us it highlighted “the importance of the issue of recognising Somaliland ... now is the time for the British government to change its policy”. Advocate.
Britpop’s debt to John Le Carré
GUITARIST Graham Coxon, above, has revealed there was a clandestine back-channel between his band Blur and rivals Oasis during the Britpop battles. “There was somebody who worked around Oasis and somebody who worked around Blur, who would make sure that releases were staggered, so we wouldn’t step on each others’ toes,” Coxon tells the Rockonteurs podcast, adding: “It was like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or the Second World War.” Crafty.
Composer’s music ‘made royals cry’
THE composer of two pieces of music released yesterday for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee says they moved members of the royal family to tears. Loretta Kay-Feld, a Hackney-born composer who lives in Israel, says someone “close to the Queen” got in touch to ask her to create the pieces, called 70 Years a Queen and The Queen’s Soliloquy. “I read a book about the Queen and I took a walk along the clifftops near where I live … and when I get home, I sat down and wrote it all out. A composition has to come from your heart and your mind,” she told the Jewish Chronicle. A palpable hit.
SW1A
MICHAEL GOVE’S much-anticipated Levelling Up white paper last week reminded a Labour adviser of their policy from 2017. Gove said the plan represented the “biggest transfer of power from Whitehall... in modern times”.
Five years ago John McDonnell, above, then Labour’s shadow chancellor, announced their plan for the North would be the “greatest transfer of power from London... since the Industrial Revolution”. McDonnell offers this broadside to The Londoner: “One of the many ideas the Tories have stolen from me but they are always so pathetically half-hearted they are bound to fail.” Sign him up, Mr Gove?
