In a sexy fashion world, one designer covers up

Nzinga Knight is black and a devout Muslim  something almost unique on Planet Fashion.

Designers love to push boundaries in search for that sexy catwalk look, but Nzinga Knight, an American Muslim, takes an even more daring tack – covering her models up.

At New York Fashion Week, impossibly tall, slinky creatures will sashay down the runways in clothes that leave little to the imagination.

But when it’s Knight’s turn, forget about flashes of breast or thigh-high split skirts. There will be long sleeves, long hems – and they’ll be sure to get attention.

“Definitely in my work people look at it and say it’s really different, and fashion’s really about being different,” she said at a studio in the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was embroidering a romantic, but modest, black-and-cream dress.

Knight, 31, is a devout Muslim, praying five times a day. But the up-and-coming designer is more fashionista than preacher.

“The look of my work is sensual, mysterious, innovative.” She describes her target as “a woman who’s happy to be a woman”.

Nzinga Knight says male pop stars are judged on their talent, but women, like Rihanna, have to take off their clothes.

The difference lies in how she creates that sensuality.

When she launched her line in 2008, she found designers were fixated by clothes that “show cleavage and back”.

“I felt a lot of women were wearing things because that’s what the magazines told them. It seemed each designer had the same point of view.”

So Knight set out to combine Islam’s strict moral codes with her native New Yorker sense of style, and quickly found she had what any enterprising young designer would crave – a niche.

“My aesthetic was something missing in the market. It’s very distinct and can give me an edge.”

Her upcoming collection features 10 evening dresses and several blouses. Shades of off-white, black, pink and matte gold dominate, with beads hand-sewn in India added to the trim. One full-length dress in black and oyster-shell white features a ruffled lower hem, but only at the back, so it comes as a surprise, like a mermaid’s tail.

It’s modest clothing, but hardly fit for a shrinking violet. Whoever wears it “definitely has places to go”.

Knight’s original outlook makes her almost unique on planet fashion, where black designers are rare and black Muslims rarer. “There are basically none.”

But with her exotic background, she’s always comfortable navigating her own path. Her father emigrated from Trinidad, her mother from Guyana, both of them converting to Islam after reaching New York, where they brought up six daughters.

“The fact I’m in New York, a native New Yorker, and New York is very much about style, what’s fresh, what’s hot, and the fact I come from a Caribbean culture that’s very vibrant, and then the fact I’m Muslim... I embody a lot of things.”

In some Muslim countries, head-to-toe black robes, or abayas, are obligatory for women in the street, something that horrifies many Westerners.

But Knight says her experiences make her sympathetic. On a trip last year to Dubai, where one of her sisters lives, she recalls discovering the apparently uniform black fabric contains a multitude of subtle, individual differences.

“No two women were the same.”

She also realises that at home, women take off their robes to reveal the latest in high fashion they’d been wearing underneath.

“They are vibrant and wear amazing colours. Only their special friends get to see them, though. I think it’s sexy for a woman to have secrets, good secrets.”

She says that in Western society, women are not as liberated as they may think they are.

Knight gives the example of pop stars, saying men are judged largely on their singing talent, while female performers have to go an extra step.

“I think women in this society aren’t allowed to just stand on their own merit.

“For most of the women who really make it, you know, they have to take their clothes off. That’s the game they have to play.”

In her work, she’s looking to shift the rules of the game. “I’m telling a story people aren’t telling,” Knight said. – Sapa-AFP