Spring Summer Collection 2018

“Born in 1961 in Larache, in northern Morocco, Hassan Hajjaj now divides his time between London and Marrakech. His creative work bears witness to a fascination with urban cultures, consumer products, popular imagery and American Pop Art.
In these images from Marrakech he plays on the sophisticated codes of fashion circles and music videos. He also succeeded in turning young, heavily veiled and jellaba-clad women into magazine icons and hip-hop stars. The photographs, looking at first glance like Orientalist fantasies, use humour and derision to exploit the ambiguities and contradictions implied by the veil and traditional dress. The accessories, sometimes embellished with haute couture and sportswear logos, transcend any pleading for Orientalism or the female condition and reveal, by standing things on their head, the commonplaces of the Western model and its consumer society.
Kitschy and highly coloured, subversive and outlandish, Hassan Hajjaj’s images put crucial questions about the way East and West see each other, and about cultural exchange between them. They demonstrate that these two worlds are reciprocal creations, each existing, maybe, within the other.”