OMER ASIM
Born in Khartoum, Sudan, and now living and working in London, Omer Asim graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture before completing a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. He then began training as a psychoanalyst before a growing interest in clothes as cultural objects saw him take up a number of placements in the fashion industry. He later completed a creative pattern-cutting degree at Central Saint Martins, and launched his eponymous fashion label in 2011. His distinctly academic sensibility – his work is precise and process-driven, and his patterns are informed by his historical research – results in clothing of neutral colour palettes, constructed using intricate tailoring, which won him the Fashion Trust Arabia Award in 2020. His latest project is to apply his understanding of adornment as cultural phenomena to the production of a perfume inspired by the familial scent-making traditions of Sudan. Asim spoke to TANK about the development of the project and the importance of memory, tradition and technique.
Interview by Caroline Issa
Portrait courtesy Omer Asim
Caroline Issa Not many people realise that your label has been going for 11 years.
Omer Asim The first few years, I used it as a laboratory experiment. I made very small collections and didn’t think too much about making something popular. It was more of an archive-building exercise.
CI An archive-building exercise at the beginning of your career. I love that.
OA Everyone needs to first home in on an area or a technique, before they really start to sell. Now I find that I always go back to my first five years. In fact, I am selling things from those times.
CI So you developed your language in those first five years and sales were “nice to have”, if ever? You actually came from an architecture, rather than a design, background?
OA Architecture, and then followed by Organisational and Social Psychology. Then I got interested in fashion through anthropology, visual anthropology, how people consume images. I came into it in a roundabout way, and I think it took me about three years to find a department that would take on my proposal for a PhD. It was always between two or three departments. In the end, I found Goldsmiths, who were a lot more flexible – maybe because it’s also an arts college. Also, they were already looking at culture from an anthropological point of view, and analysing culture through psychoanalysis, which was probably quite new for fashion. A few years ago, I heard that there is now a psychoanalytic and fashion programme beginning to take shape at King’s College. Apparently, even the London School of Economics is now interested in this.
CI One of the reasons why we’re talking for this travel issue is because of your new project: after 11 years of making clothes, you are going back to your academic roots with a perfume project in Sudan.
OA Last week I finally managed to speak to a perfumer, who was very knowledgeable of the tradition of making perfume in that region. He said to me, “Is this the scent you’re talking about?” He gave me the name and I couldn’t believe someone out there knew about it. I am fascinated by perfume because I love perfume, but that is not really a strong enough reason. Over time, I have become more and more interested in why I love it, and the more I’ve looked into it and the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve found that maybe there is an essentialism to the essences that come to us through olfaction or taste. You also find it in food, no matter how we might adapt or assimilate it to different cultures by travelling. It’s the one thing that doesn’t betray you. Food and perfume carry something very essential to our identity.
CI You’re trying to create a modern-day perfume using ancient, idiosyncratic techniques that you only find in one specific area of Sudan?
OA Part of the project is to try to research it properly – as there might be misinformation [about its origins]. So, I’m leaving space for the unknown. But despite the decline in the knowledge and art of making this perfume, there is great demand for it and a lot of local pride. In our preliminary research, we found that the perfume has evolved with the advent of imported products and perfumes, though this perfume, and its evolving form, remains an identity marker for Sudanese women. I am hoping to find things completely outside of what I started with, because otherwise, maybe it’s not really worth it.
CI The journey is worth it. As is potentially the end product.
OA I hope so! The other thing that I’ve also thought about is the practice of body care. It is always thought to be a modern, Western thing, but it’s also another essential part of civil society. If you want to talk about inclusion and diversity, you have to think about it a little deeper; it can’t just be a person of colour on the cover of a magazine. There has to be more to it, maybe to try to reappropriate some of the civil-cultural practices, and re-root them where they have come from.
CI I love what you wrote about how indigenous art is made by women for women. I’m going to read from your funding application: “Using ingredients native to Sudan mixed with other ingredients that entered the culture through ancient trade routes, traditionally, mothers would make sizable batches of the perfume for their daughters in the lead up to their wedding, to usher them into married life. As such, the perfume recipe would differ from region to region and from one family to another. The perfume is meant to stay and lasts for your whole married lifetime, and it is said to age like wine.” How beautiful is that? You’re starting from this place of handed-down techniques and traditions and you have a couple years to research, change and develop this into a final commercial product, which is a perfume made of ingredients from Sudan.
OA Yes, exactly. The perfume has a dough-like base made from Prunus Mahaleb, which is crushed into sandy granules and smoked underground in a fire that burns for three days on the wood of the Acacia Seyal or Shittah tree. Shittah wood is known, locally, for its antiseptic and anti-ageing properties. The tree grows wild in the Sinai desert, the banks of the River Nile in Sudan and the Jordan River Valley. In the Exodus, the ancient Israelites were commanded to use Shittah to make various parts of the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. When I spoke to the perfumer last week, he was very interested in knowing what exact ingredients we have there. He mentioned he makes his own essences and when he has, say, a jasmine essence he has 16 of them because they all come from different regions around the world. Even if we use, say, myrrh or frankincense, the one coming from a specific region will have its own smell, taste and essence.
CI Which means pinpointing the ingredients native to your specific region in Sudan becomes incredibly important.
OA Yes. That is going to be the first leg of the research. Fortunately, I happen to know an entomologist – an insect scientist – who is well versed in the flora of the whole country. He is going to be an important point of contact, because if you know about insects, you know plants. He told me that someone has already compiled a big pool of references for the medicinal and aromatic plants of Sudan.
CI What an interesting journey to take, to start a fragrance from entomology.
OA I am beginning to find out more and more how the project can work, and how it should work. I hope that the project will make crossovers into the tangible and intangible cultural aspects of dress, mind and body. We view fashion and its production processes as “applied humanities” – this gives us the opportunity to operationalise some of our ideas and affect change in colonial attitudes towards beauty and its ideals.
CI So you’re in the first phase of this two-year project; you’re still in the research phase. The question at its heart is how to create a scent that originates in some of the most traditional and unknown alchemy?
OA We’re now also beginning to think, and I should speak to someone about this, that this might have something to do with the ancient Egyptians’ way of mummification, because they used a lot of oils. All this might date back to mummification. I heard that there is someone who knows about this, but he doesn’t have anything written down, so I have to go and catch him [in Sudan] before anything happens to him. He might also have some book references… I’m going to have to put a cap on how much time I give to research and then, it will be on to making the actual perfume.
CI You’re also rooting it in the practices of your mother, of your grandmothers, of your memories of smells, even the techniques.
OA Yes, after you have made the dough you must keep kneading it for a week, so the fire has to be kept burning. This is what makes it a little bit outmoded now – no one really has the time to do it.
CI Nobody has time to stoke a fire for a week to make sure their dough is fumigated in order to make a fragrance!
OA This is also why it’s dying out – no one wants to learn it, it’s just too backbreaking.
CI The project has such beautiful ambition, and it’s just the beginning. It’s bringing a tradition to the West in a richly researched mission that will then be combined with magic when you find your perfumer.
OA Yes, I hope so.
CI It will then live in a little bottle. For me, that is travel – bringing these ingredients and placing them in a vessel to transport you to another world or trigger memories.
OA You should do my press release!
CI It would be a pleasure, sign me up. Two years from now, let’s talk! ◉