We recently connected with Mark Khan and have shared our conversation below.

Mark, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

The most meaningful project for me was my first collection under Universal Rejects, titled “For What It’s Worth”. This was a very personal collection for me because For what it’s worth is about taking different parts of my past and putting them together. For me, art is a way of showing emotion and being open which is something I am not as used to doing so with growing up in a Nigerian household. This led me to the title of the collection “For what it’s worth” because I was exploring very uncharted territory by being this open about myself. The title encapsulates my feeling towards being so personal with my work and my being unsure of how it will be received. Each piece tells its own story from different periods of my life.

For the lookbook, I took inspiration from two major parts of my life that influenced me while growing up. For the framing of the picture, I was inspired by a stamp from Nigeria which I had found in my dad’s briefcase when I was much younger. This was the most cherished possession I had because it was one of the main connections I obtained with the home that I’ve heard many stories about but had never seen at that point. In deciding on a location I wanted to recreate the scenery of a typical Nigerian compound. Concrete floors, Tall painted gates, and plants. I combined these two points of personal nostalgia, which also captured my envisioning of what Nigeria was like from the stories I was told growing up and the reality of my experiences from getting to grow up in Nigeria in the second half of my childhood.

My favorite piece of the collection would be the 7 am Denim two-piece. With this piece I was looking at creating something as simple as jeans and making it my own, I was inspired by my childhood and how growing up in my family it was essential to have a pair of old jeans that had paint all over it, my father was a contractor and on the weekends my dad would wake my siblings and me up at 7 am to go to work with him where we helped out with a wide range of things like carrying wood to painting. After a long day of work, I would love to come home and see how much I ended up getting on my jeans just because of how interesting I thought it was. Then I would fold them up and put them back in my closet to wear the next time I work with my dad. So I took inspiration from this experience to create the 7 am denim because to me having denim with paint all over it was essential and I wanted to share this with the world.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My journey as an artist has been an interesting one because I love making and trying new things so my work has changed a lot over time. But that also comes with me not wanting to make the same thing again and again. I started designing clothes under my first brand in 2016 called Khan’s Kloset and stopped in early 2018 because I felt like I could do better and the work I was putting out wasn’t my best. I then used the time that I wasn’t using to run Khan’s Kloset anymore to study fashion and to truly hone in on my taste and my voice as a designer. During this time I also decided to focus more on another art form to help me grow more as an artist. So I decided to become a photographer. This truly started because I found Gunner Stahl’s Instagram page and then Ciesay of Places Plus Faces and I fell in love with their work because they were shooting with all the artists I loved and making books of these photos. So with photography, I started as a film photographer and slowly I began to pick up digital photography along the way. Photography was a breath of fresh air for me after not liking my work with my first brand and truly gave me to space to really understand design better. After two years of working on growing as an artist, I finally felt ready to start making clothes and officially dropped Universal Rejects. Now we are working on putting together our 3rd collection and have been able to expand as well throwing pop-up shops across different cities. Also with photography I was able to put together my first solo show titled “Forget Me Not” that found a lot of success.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Some videos that helped me a lot through my journey and are still helping me are the Virgil Abloh Lectures. I find them to be so insightful and honest about the creative process and also the business of fashion so I would recommend people check those out.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I would say the most rewarding aspect of being an artist for me is being able to create something that means something to people. I still always love when I’m able to share my work with people and they understand it and are able to resonate with it because my work is primarily focused on telling stories, so when people can understand or resonate to the stories it means the world to me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.universalrejects.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iam_markkhan/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnFTz5fUGK8w1fpSdXCKPVA
• Other: https://www.mark-khan.com/

Image Credits
Shot by Mark Khan, Taoheed Bayo and the picture of the “Forget Me Not” was shot by Kehinde Famule