Freedom is priceless: Hushidar Mortezaie on satire as resistance and the art of third spaces

For some time now, I’ve taken issue with ‘fashion’ as a noun. That is, as “capitalism’s favourite child”; an identifier of a mass; a kind of hagiography emanating from industry, taste, status, money; and a monopoly on modernity according to its colonial metropole in the west, framing the terms of inclusion for those coming from elsewhere. 

Fashion as a verb, however, ruptures the possibilities of how we can relate to it across temporalities and beyond colonial differences, reorienting it “through alternative trajectories of hope, alternative relations to earth, to community, to language, to bodies, to ourselves; through alternative forms of worlding the world,” according to cultural and fashion anthropologist Angela Jansen in Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity.

Over the past few months, I’ve returned to my musings, mulling over the musical chairs of the last season. More recently, though, after a two-hour conversation with the Iranian half of Michael & Hushi, Hushidar Robot Mortezaie, I’ve found myself hope-maxxing. “Fashion is a verb,” I keep repeating to myself. Alongside Michael Sears, a Las Vegas native, his eponymous brand was a staple among New York’s club kids and celebrities in the late noughties and early Y2Ks, known for its romantic blend of pop culture imagery, Americana, Iranophilia, and Arab iconography. 

At a time ushering in sweeping Islamophobia, Michael & Hushi managed to create an alternative world while confronting the place it was operating (in the heart of the empire, no less), dressing the most glamorous denizens of pop culture. Think: Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw in a keffiyeh halter top on Sex and the City, Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden wearing a tank screenprinted with smut in Fight Club, Beyoncé donning a leather jacket hand-painted with Persian miniatures, and Madonna evoking Googoosh as a Kolah Makhmali archetype in a black jersey top live on stage. More recently, Bella Hadid broke the internet in a red-and-white keffiyeh dress at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.

The supermodel’s dress, like the top worn by SJP in “A Vogue Idea”, came from Michael & Hushi’s debut runway collection, A Persian Odyssey, in February 2001. It was a $5,000 production staged in a packed Lower East Side loft, where guests sat cross-legged on prayer rugs as models sauntered down a 42nd Street runway to DJ Levon Vincent’s mix of Hayedeh, Googoosh, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Prince.

Descending on the runway, models were clad in flouncy denim harem pants and lace dresses brandished with slogans like “Death to Imperialists”, softened by romantic ruffles and bohemian handkerchief hems, but with a subtext of a noughties club aplomb. Accessorised with military regalia and traditional Persian riding shoes with curled toes and stiletto heels, some of the models wore hijab and had their eyebrows filled in, evoking the silver nitrate-stained unibrows of the Qajar era.

At a time when fashion’s obsession with newness and modernity was collapsing into a growing infatuation with vintage and the thrift shop aesthetic, the show was a radical masterclass in novelty. It was a result of the pair’s uncanny way of using play, satire, and glamour to create clothes with ardent political and pop culture depth, without trying too hard. 

For Hushi, it was always simple. “It was just a blender of my experience, and just blurting it out and building on it with Michael,” he says, joining me and Dazed MENA’s fashion director, Omaima, via Zoom. Now in his fifties, the soft-spoken artist and designer is gracious, a little shy, and extraordinarily humble. “It was just literally new and raw, and it was very much a combination of two people.”

In its show review headlined “The Body Politic” and published on 15 February 2001, Women’s Wear Daily wrote that the duo “brought back the exuberance of those days of old… Iranian princesses in full post-millennial regalia stormed the runway”. A special mention was given to the keffiyeh dress now synonymous with Hadid: “One scarf dress, cut on the bias and delicately tiered, looked worthy of some fancy atelier, both in attitude and precision.” 

In a later review published five days later, however, the same publication wedged the designers into a piece around the purported trend of militancy overcoming the runway. Misaligning the liberation slogans and keffiyeh, it drew comparisons to the Unabomber and fanaticism around the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

British Vogue, meanwhile, featured one of the skirts in a review titled “Generation Terrorist” without crediting the designers or the season. “Fashion, not usually the most political of creatures, seems to have transformed into a bolshie activist over the past few seasons, intent on undermining every trend in recent memory,” wrote Charlotte Sanders. For a review of the men’s season, meanwhile, Charlie Porter of The Guardian dubbed its prevailing message “terrorist chic”.   

The coverage reflected the fashion world’s ongoing tendency to proclaim itself as undefiled by politics and a growing sense of a civilisational logic. At the same time, the season was appropriative itself, with the high-fashion cavalry turning towards the ‘east’. A good chunk of white male designers drew on ‘orientalist’ themes ranging from the kimono and geishas to the keffiyeh. For them, these were trends to dip into before disregarding them the following season. For Hushi, a Muslim-Iranian immigrant, it was lived.

“This felt like a cause and something more than fashion. It was very personal because there’s always a threat against you,” he says, reflecting on The Persian Odyssey. “It’s part of the bigger picture because it goes beyond the designer. It becomes part of the movement of fighting for your heritage, roots, and pride because we are far from being accepted in any way.”

A whirlwind few months later, the fight gained new ground. Hushi, energised by his taking more trips to Iran, was preparing to showcase the brand’s Roses From the Gutter collection (Spring 2002). The show was slated for 14 September 2001. Needless to say, the show did not run as scheduled. 

Like it did for all Muslims, 9/11 upturned Hushi’s trajectory. “It was just the worst. Islamophobia has existed since the dawn of time, but that was when it was totally out, loud, and proud,” he explains. He was immediately presented with a choice: continue his practice of showing all of the region’s sides lovingly and claiming it in all its complexities, or “do whatever the f*ck Diane von Furstenberg did and make American flag chiffon dresses”. But pandering to society’s expectations was never a skill possessed by Hushi—the Roses From the Gutter show was held a month later.

Moving from Iran at the age of two in 1975, he was a “Shirley Temple-looking kid” who grew up on a diet of revolutionary literature passed down by his father (a member of Iran’s political left) and Osamu Tezuka’s anime, coalescing with America’s frenetic rolodex of popular culture (Style with Elsa Klensch and Wonder Woman in particular). Yet being raised in America, a place steeped in xenophobic homeostasis, wasn’t easy. Hushi recalls feeling stuck in a liminal state of unbelonging: “You were thought of as an alien, a misfit.” 

The isolation aside, he was simultaneously grappling with a growing sense of alterity with his gender and sexuality. “We didn’t have the luxury of pronouns,” he explains. “If you would consider, I would’ve been a ‘they’ back then, but I definitely thought I was a girl. Then I realised, ‘Oh no…’ I was attracted to female power, glamorous women in power, fighting. So I would draw outfits and that’s where I kind of got into it [fashion].” 

Eventually, once ascending into college at UC Berkeley – double-majoring in fine arts and the Persian parent-mandated pre-med while working his way to window stylist at Wasteland – the club would find him and allow him a theatre in which to transform and deconstruct himself, living each look as its own new world. It was there, in 1991, at a club in San Francisco, that Hushi met Sears. “I saw this person who I thought was this androgynous girl with a short Caesar, yellow hair, orange polka dots, white vinyl bitch boots, a Yamaha jersey, and a monkey fur coat. I was like, ‘Wow, this is the most glamorous human being.’ It was so i-D magazine, it was so London. He was dressed as Wonder Bread. It was literally the most pop art thing I’d seen.”

Hushi ignited their partnership by asking Sears to make him an outfit for ToonTown, hailed as the rave to end all raves. Having spent his adolescence sewing car dashboards and fashioning outfits for showgirls, Sears could quite literally make anything—even from the most unsuspecting of materials. Between his innate knack for design and Hushi’s bottomless reservoir of imagination, the pair exploded onto the scene with an inimitable portfolio, their looks echoing the camp panache of Leigh Bowery.

Eventually, they were flown to the Club Kid capital in New York for a style summit in 1993 and relocated to the city a year later, into the noir-ish Hotel 17, around the same time I imagine Amanda Lepore was claiming her boudoir there, too. “It was the beginning of Michael Alig’s underground club kids scene. Grunge was happening, everything was happening [in New York], and it felt like we were a part of something. San Francisco was much sweeter, it was more London Ecstasy.”  

It wasn’t long before they found work at Pat Field’s 8th Street store, a stomping ground for New York’s avant-garde. Hushi remembers walking into the store and being unwittingly thrown into a competition for a permanent position. “It was Paris Is Burning, but it was the next version. I was the only Iranian human being, and there weren’t many people of colour. It was like the white rave club kids scene, and it was a competition, but I didn’t really understand that. One day, Pat comes in and asks, ‘Who are you?’ And I replied, as I always did, ‘I’m Hushi, I’m Iranian.’”

With the iconic costume designer hiring Hushi on the spot, he became her mentee, buying on her behalf worldwide alongside Sears. Eventually, travelling to Japan, he’d return with Hysteric Glamour, catalysing the Japanese pop phenomenon that followed in America and the launch of Fields’ now-shuttered Hotel Venus. Field, in turn, would funnel the keffiyeh top and other Michael & Hushi pieces (a ruffled white lace dress adorned with Omar Khayyam poetry included) into Carrie’s hands, where they reside to this day, locked up in Parker’s sprawling SATC archive.

The experience ushered in their first label, Sears and Robot, in 1995. In the likeness of Nobuhiko Kitamura’s anti-consumerist logics, the name was a tongue-in-cheek play on the American conglomerate Sears, Roebuck and Co. In fact, Hushi legally added a middle name, Robot, upon becoming an American citizen. “We are all robots in this country,” he quips.

Broke and struggling, the pair moved into the Gramercy Park studio of their new chosen family member, Sue, two cats and two industrial sewing machines in tow. Two years later, the duo opened their only store (“a tiny shoe box”) on the Lower East Side. “That was the best time of my life. I don’t think I have had more joy other than when I was in San Francisco, sowing my oats in the club,” Hushi beams. The store itself was a sort of silver-encrusted candyland designed after Iranian sweet shops; the floors were stainless steel and the walls draped in mylar, brought together by a neon sign featuring Hushi’s robot drawing and a dollar sign for Sears. 

Harajuku aside, Hushi’s design influences at the time stemmed from Vivienne Westwood to Thierry Mugler, although the former held a special place. “She wasn’t just about fashion. What she did was teach you how to say ‘f*ck off’ but with poetry,” he explains, drawing a clear difference between Westwood’s era and the one we’re in now. “We’re in a time when we overly have to say everything because it’s very didactic, but for her, it just wasn’t. Westwood was a subculture and wielded that.” 

Echoing the Westwood 70s, the noughties were an inflexion point defined by subversion. Throughout the world, social traumas began to transform fashion sense, fuelled by rage, turning youth sensibilities toward anti-establishment dissent. This time, grunge had musically found its place in poster children like Nirvana and sartorially in the likes of Alexander McQueen’s aesthetic quartet of memento mori, moral fetishism, abject aesthetics, and the wasted look. True to Westwood’s influence, Sears and Hushi’s DIY spirit similarly toyed with the germinating fin-de-siècle feelings, albeit less overtly, distinguishing their work from the niches by way of colour and glamour. Rather than emulating the mould of grunge and punk and chasing subcultural capital, they were more instinctual and transnational—and therefore radical. 

Much of their work skewered the quasi-cultural rot of the late 90s alongside mass consumerism, punctuated by rising rents, gentrification, and the end of the club era. For instance, as Rudy Giuliani “cleaned up” Times Square and 42nd Street, the pair responded with smut. 

Inspired by the film Boogie Nights, they collaged pornography and pop iconography into Xerox-printed tops and mesh dresses. A little later, Club Kid courtiers Michael Alig and Robert “Freeze” Riggs were arrested, and Harmony Korine’s Gummo hit theatres. The pair responded with their Boardwalk Burn-out collection of cut-up glitter baseball shirts, frayed with beads, and airbrushed with unicorns, eagles, and graffiti, in an ironically flamboyant jab at the lacklustre American dream. From here came the fated Fight Club tanks, after Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s incessant purchases of the collection piqued Michael Kaplan’s interest. 

“What happened is that he asked us to cut this tank even lower and print panels of fabric, so we did, and it ends up in the movie, but we’re not given credit,” Hushi explains. The publicity was a double-edged sword. On one hand, they received a cease-and-desist letter from Sears, Roebuck and Co., forcing them to change the brand name to Michael & Hushi. On the other hand, fashion elites began swanning into the store, followed briskly by ‘It’ girls and celebrities like Britney Spears, Stella McCartney, and Liv Tyler.

Despite the growing renown, Hushi was, and still is, allergic to celebrity. “I didn’t like celebrities feeling too fierce. I was about the real people, the cool kids in the East Village who were like me.” True to his subversion, critiquing celebrity was a through line in his practice, even beyond fashion. The pair’s 2003 Icons collection, for example, was a glorious, camp critique of their personal icons as well as the idolatry of fame. Models role-played as Michael Jackson to a Linda Evangelista doppelgänger fashioned as Ronald McDonald, a nod to the outfit worn by Sears to ToonTown.

The core of their subversion, however, really began with a coming-of-age around the last two years of the 90s, when a sense of longing that Hushi couldn’t quite put a finger on started brewing, flaming a deeper need for transgression—one taking him home. “Here I was, transforming myself but not finding out who I was, so I started trying to figure it out and working out all the issues I had since I was a child.”

In November 2000, he went back to Iran. “It was love—the kindness of people on the street, the sound of the azaan at sunset, and everything I’d experienced in my home, which had once felt like a little prison. And all these kids, these girls, were playing with the hijab and the manteau. I thought, ‘This is Japan, the clothes are just as hardcore.’ I was in love. This was home, and I was very emotional when I left.”

It was a coming-of-age in Hushi’s artistic practice that cemented the Michael & Hushi woman who is, above all, always defined by complexity and strength. “I was obsessed with  Kurdish female warriors; the Qajar women for mixing east and west and being princess-y; and the leftist feminist revolutionaries that were pre-revolution.” 

These women were transmuted into an imago summa called “We Will Not Submit” bearing four women standing side by side, their unibrows drawn, draped in Qajar and Kurdish skirts, harem pants, and lace dresses frayed with keffiyehs, printed with revolutionary slogans. The work was a response to the racist superlatives stereotyping Iranians and Arabs as terrorists, oppressed, or oppressors, taking a mirror to those imaginaries and reflecting it in their armour. As Hushi says with a sly grin on our call, it was a sartorial retort. Oh really? Well, here you go, in your face.

“I don’t think I did anything intentionally, to be honest with you,” he admits. “It’s just what I thought looked beautiful. I wanted to introduce my culture and these little aspects, but they were also me addressing the tropes and deflecting them back.” His words bring to mind something that Yohji Yamamoto once said: “I make clothing like armor. My clothing protects you from unwelcome eyes.”

For Hushi, though, it seems that the clothes taunt rather than simply protect from unwelcome eyes. Not for their sight, of what they see, but their blindness. What they cannot and refuse to see: the complexities of the other, their beauty and ugliness, that seeing only in twos will never apprehend. 

What allows this tension to come through most, however, is not seriousness, but play and satire. “There was humour,” Hushi explains. “All of our work has satire. It’s not one-sided, that’s the beautiful part. We’re all crap, we’re all junk. You know, my fellow Iranians have tortured me on social media for years. I mean, it’s all about love and celebration and negation in a way.” 

Today, satire and irony have made a comeback in fashion, memeifying collections in a grab for consumer attention, though most are arguably crass and formulaic, using satire for the sake of shock value (much like Vetements Spring/Summer 2026). As artist Oluwatobiloba Ajayi writes in Real Review 17, “Satire should be a way of raising awareness of the role an audience plays in a set of power relationships. It requires an antagonistic relationship between its content and its audience, destabilising our perceptions rather than merely playing into them.” 

That’s exactly what Sears and Hushi were doing, like Westwood and without didactics, showing the enduring cognitive dissonance of society by fashioning radical new ways of worlding the world. It was also really camp—not in the Sontagian sense of the word, that while great is limited in its whiteness, but more proximate to how anthropologist Aya El Sharkawy defines Arab camp: excessive, subversive, emancipatory, visceral. “The impact they left is pretty massive, and people don’t understand it,” explains Olivia Haroutounian, a die-hard fan and collector of Michael & Hushi. “I think they brought a lot of joy back into fashion because they were also not afraid to play with different types of commentary that wouldn’t be used today.”  

Indeed, the brand not only set the bar for the ones that followed, but also gave a generation of labels from the region a clear reference point. As the co-founder of The Third Line, Sunny Rahbar, who was in New York during Micheal & Hushi’s reign, tells me, “Hushi is, in my opinion, the most ahead of his time designer and really an artist who paved the way for so many others.” One undeniable example? Palestinian brand Trashy Clothing. Its wit and biting critique of capitalism and colonialism via Arab camp descend straight from the Michael & Hushi legacy.

Their work created vital space, one that was unremittingly needed, yet perhaps arrived too early, at the core of an empire in an existential crisis. “You know, we got even more press, but the huge shoots in Vogue that were supposed to happen with our pieces were all cancelled,” reveals Hushi, delving into the aftermath of 9/11. The few openings for designers with different backgrounds became even scarcer and, in 2002, they had to close the shop. New York’s scene was fading, post-9/11 Islamophobia was rising, and rents were choking independents. “This neighbourhood is finished,” he told Paper at the time. 

Still, the trio regrouped in a small place in Jersey and kept going, shifting to wholesale. From there, they staged the aforementioned Icons show, followed by Illusions of Grandeur (Fall 2003) and ending with their Paris Is Burning (Spring 2004) collection. The latter was inspired by the mid-80s ballroom community that created everything with nothing, and, in the same spirit, the grande finale was pulled off with only $3,000 in just 24 days. Similarly, the title of the prior runway show was a biting oxymoron for the plight of struggling independent designers, with Hushi and Sears famously transforming into Siegfried and Roy for a portrait teasing the collection. All of their shows were greeted with glowing reviews and a handful of editorial features, celebrity sightings included.

However, much like the name of the fated show,  it was all a kind of illusion—the pair never found funding or backing. “You know, it was this constant press frenzy, which my mom mailed to me once. ‘You’re just kaf, kaf,’ she said. That means applause. She was like, ‘You’re just doing this for applause.’ And she nailed it. We didn’t have the money to really build our own brand. Fashion is costly.”

A later piece that Hushi made for an exhibition, Occupy Me (2019), addressed the contradictions of fashion capital with a collage that refigured the full-circle moment Linda Evangelista wore the Ronald McDonald outfit for Vogue Italia in 2003. At the time, however, the pair could not afford to buy a copy of the magazine. It’s a case in the industry that has stuck: the great dissonance between the glitzy editorials and celebrity sheen that furnish the dreams of any designer and the harsh reality of actually being one (excluding the nepos). One where choosing to buy Vogue over dinner isn’t romantic, it’s absurd.

To make matters worse, being uncredited on Fight Club was only the tip of the iceberg in the crimes against the brand. From artist Shepard Fairey to Urban Outfitters stylists, there is a hefty ledger of plagiarists. One of the most striking, I discovered, came after their first runway show, when a certain legacy house (no names will be named) came out with a Fall 2001 Couture collection described by Vogue as “a defiant troop of militants” wearing “stern military jackets, embroidered lace dresses, chic djellabas, hooded tunics, and Palestinian-inspired shirts”. The cherry on top was the telltale red headband on the creative director as he walked out to close the show, much like the one Hushi was known to wear.

“There was no culture of social media that gives people power; it was very Trump-y. You know, it was the kind of thing where people in power just take from you. That’s all that happened—they just took, took, took,” Hushi says of the theft, earnestly and forgivingly. “But what can you do? I’m not now, I’m then. It wasn’t the same. We didn’t have phones, we didn’t have anything.” 

“I mean, it’s actually still the same,” asserts Omaima. “I still see young designers being copied by big brands. That’s just the essence of fashion in a way.” 

For Hushi, specifically, whose work was so effervescently his own and really specific in its cultural handling, it’s even more embattled. The exoticisation and acclaim for a designer’s uniqueness, while simultaneously stealing and then excluding said designer from the room, is an epidemic in the fashion world, and Hushi’s case foretold the dynamics that continue to this day. 

“I’m not the kind of person who has that black metal heart. One of the reasons we left fashion [in 2003] is that people are very treacherous, like the art world is now. It’s all the same, and that’s how all the creative worlds can be when they’re not about creating for your own joy, you know?” Admitting to his fear of success, he adds, “Whenever there’s some sort of success, it’s nice in whatever capacity, but then I’m like, I have to take a step back.” 

It’s clear, even with all the adulation he may have received at the time, Hushi has never operated in spaces of recognition. “I’ve never fit in. I’ve always been a misfit,” Hushi explains. His works are instead hidden in a timeless third space, complete with robots and qajars and, ultimately, the fashion industry was not embracing that—especially at the time. “I love being in those quiet, hidden spaces. That’s always been the thing, I don’t want people to tell me what to do.”

“Freedom is priceless,” responds Omaima. “Freedom is priceless,” Hushi repeats. We pause.

While Hushi’s aversion to success in the capitalist sense of the term is a terrible trait for business, his version is that of the great mavericks: “I want it to be for the people who are in those spaces, too.” That, while perhaps broke, will outlast even the most cunning of imitators and imperialists. 

“It was history and tradition, but making it modern. I can happily say I created a new language for the youth of the region to be able to speak in. It was different but embraced the past and the future, and made it now,” he reflects. “It was also exploring the different parts. We’re not just one thing, we’re not just a newsreel showing the tropes.” 

He certainly did. 

But what people so often get wrong about Michael & Hushi is that the brand was overtly political—but a body is political and, therefore, its clothing will be too. It was political not as a result of trying, but because Sears and Hushi were, as is often said of McQueen, good pupils of history and culture (pop and play, too, I’d add). Instead of Britain, it was Iran, and it was also America. 

“Hushi was the postmodern lovechild between the east and the west that every girl with a bit of spice who lived through the millennium would dream of wearing,” Omaima describes. “It broke borders in a way that no other designers have.” 

This melange of east and west is striking not because it is exotic in the way that such terms are flung around in subpar curatorial statements about ‘common-ness’ and ‘citizens of the world’ just to present tired pastiches of a flattered white gaze. But in a discordant sense, remixing references to pop, politics, and commercialism to create pieces that could shock viewers with their newness, contesting tradition and modifying it rather than preserving a singular culture alone, which is hardly possible anyway in today’s globalised setting. Doing this, they spoke the words of recognition, liberation, and belonging that so many at the time – and now – might not know how to express. 

“He made us all feel so inspired but also proud,” says Rahbar. “I met him when he was still in New York. He and Michael had a small studio shop in the Lower East Side, and we used to go there in the late 90s to see what they were making. And we all felt this connection, a sense of home, which at the time was everything we needed and didn’t have.” Meanwhile, Haroutounian – a whole generation apart – explains, “I’ve always loved fashion, and when I found that work, the way they made me feel about clothing was the way I wanted to present myself every day.”

Today, while always an artist, Hushi wants to be an environmental scientist and has returned to land—quite literally. He’s currently enrolled at a university in California, where he is “suffering through chemistry and calculus” as he pursues an environmental science degree, working at a nature preserve, volunteering, toiling with native plants, and restoring the land. 

“So here I am back in school, when I should be making lots of clothes and thousands of versions of that Bella dress, but I’ll never make a profit off that. I have countless requests for this dress, but they can now go buy it on Shein or the copy-offs that kids keep sending me,” he laughs. His advice for his successors? As it has always been: intellectual honesty. 

“You just have to be honest with yourself. You can’t be placating, you can’t be one of the people who copy Bella’s dress or whatever it is. You just have to come from a real, personal place. It’s a dark time, but you can never give up hope. I don’t think there’s a formula to use fashion and art, but when we’re allowed to create and learn like I did, then that’s important. That was the dream, and it’s coming true. There are all these young Iranian, Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian designers taking up the mantle,” he says, citing Ayham Hassan as one of his favourite up-and-comers. 

“So now, I’m like, ‘Okay, good, now I can become an environmental scientist.’ What’s the last stop? The last stop on the bus ride of life is Earth. From landfills to land.” Interjecting, Omaima recalls, “I once met one of Anita Pallenberg’s best friends, and she said something that has stayed with me: at some point in life, every punk turns to gardening.” 

“Exactly,” Hushi says, smiling.