Love seeing what we create out in the world on all of you. Thank you for supporting the brand.
This project has been a long time in the making. But we are excited to share episode 1 of ExtraSpicyPlease featuring the Rolex Rasathy
We collaborated with Kolkata Chai and PopShift on this video series featuring artist from the global diaspora. Lately you’ve known HYFN as a clothing brand but our mission statement is clear on the fact that we are also a storytelling platform. We will use photography and video content to highlight stories from within our culture and highlight people doing incredible things. This project is a perfect representation of that.
HYFN art directed and produced all the visuals for this series and we are so excited to be sharing this with you.
One of our favorite things to do is collaborate with our friends and when Raghu and @Ani came to us with their vision, we were all in.
Featuring: @rolexrasathy “I LOVE THE WAY”
Presented by @popshift @kolkatachaico
Executive Produced by: @toobaditsrags @anihustles
Directed by: @Atif
Video Produced by: @HYFN
Audio Recording: @inhousedesignny
Show Music: @sanjoyd
Media Partners: @bollyshake
After our first 'Brown Kids with Big Imaginations' product drop we received an overwhelming amount of requests from parents to create this design in kids sizes. You spoke and we listened.
Introducing HYFN KIDS, apparel for children in sizes ranging from 6 months to Youth XL available today in our Shop.
The youth growing up today are going to be wildly creative and have more tools, resources and opportunities than we did. Their imaginations can run wild in a way that many of us could only dream of. That's what happens with each new generation, and we can't wait to see all the crazy things they will accomplish.
So to all the young Brown Kids with Big Imaginations, this collection is for you too.
Deciding to manufacture a product in the middle of the pandemic turned out to be a nightmare.
The biggest hurdle was sourcing the fabric. Because of supply chain delays and disruptions, the fabric we had sampled for our prototype became unavailable, causing a massive delay in production. This was a problem because we had already started selling the mask on our site and people were anxious to receive orders. Our manufacturer told us that it could be months before they were able to complete our order.
So you have to make a decision: wait and just have orders go out late or to figure out a solution that would minimized this delay. Obviously we chose the later and our only options was to find fabric in NYC and ship it to our manufacturer.
We made a trip to New York's garment district and started going door to door looking for the perfect fabric.
This ended up being a lot more difficult than we had thought. The right fabric not only needed to look good but also needed to feel good against your face. Several times we found fabric that we liked but they did not have enough yardage to cut the amount of masks we were making or it was too expensive and drove the mask cost up significantly.
But after 2 days of searching and hitting up several stores we finally found the perfect fabric and were able to ship it out the same day.
It was a pain the the ass but we enjoyed every minute of it because we were learning something that was completely foreign to us. It gave use visibility into a new space and how to operate within it. This is exactly what HYFN is about for us: personal growth and ventures into the unknown.
The Garment District is full of amazing fabric shops. Here are two great NYC fabric super stores to check out:
B & J Fabrics
Fashion Center Building
525 7th Ave
New York, NY 10018
Mood Fabrics
225 W 37th St
3rd floor
New York, NY 10018
Yesterday we announced to you that we are launching HYFN as a clothing brand. And today we introduce our first drop, titled "Statement of Arrival". This is our introduction to the world. "Brown Kids With Big Imaginations", this is who we are and this is who we are creating for.
This is the making of a brand, in real time. It’s a series of trial and errors which will reveal our design philosophy and aesthetic voice. This season will feel like the clutter on a desk in a mad scientist’s laboratory. A chaotic explosion of creative ideas slowly making sense together. This is about enjoying the process of touching and feeling fabrics, exploring colors or lack thereof, working with new materials, cutting patterns, heat pressing, screen printing, embroidering and so much more.
We will work through this process of design, prototyping, creating, destroying, creating again and will share the end products in our online shop. We will not limit ourselves to apparel, but will also include unique specialty items that highlight different aspects of our lifestyles.
This collection is a creative challenge we are giving ourselves.
Our hearts and minds have always been aligned with the South Asian diaspora and the creative community within. We’ve come a long way in the last few years rising up as entrepreneurs, writers, artists and creators of all kinds. Today, we see more brown faces represented all around us than ever before and it’s been an incredible movement.
Today is the beginning of something new and we are excited to announce that we are launching HYFN as a clothing brand and storytelling platform. You've seen some of our stories already, we've been doing this since 2017. But starting today you'll see us bring ideas to life through tangible products that you can touch, feel, wear, experience and live with.
We will design and develop collections of clothing and specialty products to create a new offering in the market that speaks directly to the modern South Asian hyphenated experience. At the same time, we'll tell the stories of South Asian disruptors in an effort to build community, empower and inspire. We intend to document the journey of creating this brand and to share our learnings at every stage of the process.
Earlier this year we created a face mask and a t-shirt, which reached hundreds of people and helped South Asian diaspora creators financially affected by COVID-19. We partnered with the India Center's South Asian Arts Resiliency Fund to make this happen. This served as a proof of concept and showed us how important it is to keep this idea going.
You can learn more about HYFN and our mission statement here.
This blog will be a space where we regularly share the ups and downs of our journey, bookmark it.
Instagram is our visual mood board and daily updates @HYFN.
Youtube is where all our videos will live, subscribe here.
TikTok is coming soon.
And lastly, you can sign up for our email list at the bottom of this page where we will send discounts and info about exclusive drops.
We believe this is the beginning of something special and powerful, we hope you join us on this journey.
With so much love,
Humai and Atif
We're skipping over Phase 1, which is Ideation, but we'll come back to that in a later post. For now let's dive into the process:
The HYFN Mask was designed by NAM, the designer of Coat of Arms, and we prototyped the first version of it at our studio here in Brooklyn.
This is our favorite part of the process. It's the first moment in which an idea that lives in your head starts to take shape IRL right in front of you. This phase is full of trail and error, challenges and aha moments. It's like thinking out loud with physical objects and materials. There are no bad ideas during prototyping, it's when we allow our imaginations to run free.
During this process it's important that you don't get too attached and are able to understand if an idea or design isn't working. In that case you must move on to the next. This exploration is what helps us grow and be better at the work that we do. Ideas are like muscles and need to be exercised constantly in order to be strong. Strokes of genius are far and few between. Most great ideas happen because you work on them.
With our primary business, HAPPYMONDAY, we work with the intangible and what we create lives only in the digital world. It's a completely different experience to be able to touch and feel what we are creating. These objects have texture and smell. We can wear them on our bodies. It's incredibly satisfying to create a new type of tactile connection with our audience. Opening the door into a new creative space is thrilling and it's part of what keeps us going.
THIS IS WHAT WENT DOWN AT SUMMER STAGE
After a 20 year run the legendary Basement Bhangra party that DJ Rekha curates and puts on comes to an end. To give it a proper farewell she threw a banger in Central Park with an insane line up of artists including Punjabi mc, Apache Indian, Madame Gandhi, Anik Khan, Horsepowar, Dj Shilpa. DJ Petra, Sikh Knowledge, Jaz Dhami & Malinder Tooray.
You know we love the homie Anik Khan and were super stoked to see him perform at his first ever solo show (which sold out) earlier this week at Rough Trade. If you've seen him perform, you know he's gonna be a star. Here's some photos from that day... video coming soon. =)
Our second release of SOUND-WAVES is a playlist curated by Zainab Hasnain aka Zeemuffin. She's a DJ, a social media wiz at The Verge and a photographer.
Listen to the exclusive playlist with sounds of strong women, old-school hits, and some current BLM anthems.
Learn about about her goal of this playlist below.
Can you describe your process of how you made the playlist?
I thought back on the protests that I've been to and the artists who have inserted themselves into the political conversation today without fear through their music. People like Solange and Vince Staples immediately came to mind for present day. From there I was able to see who influenced these artists and studied the revolutions from as early as the protests against the Vietnam war up to the civil rights movement. Each revolution has its rallying cries, the songs that define them. I looked and searched for those.
Why the title Resist?
To me resist is a stronger word than "fight". Resist the urge for violence, resist with peace, resist with knowledge, resist with the right strategies. Resist to me encompasses our generations sentiment to the hate, inequality and injustices of our time.
What was your intention behind this playlist?
To take listeners on a journey of the songs that define the resistance: and that resistance isn't just one movement. It's women's rights, it's BLM, it's the right to be accepted as a refugee, as a minority. I tried to hit all of those touch points: it's almost like a music history lesson on our country's continued resistance against our societies mishaps.
Who did you want to inspire?
Anyone and everyone who has ever felt marginalized.
What's your HYFN?
Pakistani-American-Explorer-Social Media Wiz-Writer-Creative
Follow Zainab on Instagram to see what she's up to.
We've been visiting Arizona quite often and after we started HYFN last year we met Negine. I'm always thinking about culture and our community, so on my recent trip to Phoenix I decided I wanted to take some photos of Negine in the beautiful landscape of the Southwest, where she lives. So we drove into the Superstition Mountains and came out with these.
I love taking portraits and experimenting with my camera. I want to meet more people within the community and if I can find a way to tell our story using photos I will.
Watch the Vlog that covers this in the previous post.
We've been traveling all over meeting incredible people and the best way we can think of sharing these experiences is through a Vlog. For our first episode we went to the middle of the Arizona desert where Humai shot a photo story with our friend Negine frolicking around the beautiful southwestern landscape.
It's important to continually be working on your craft. Just as athletes train all year around we creatives need to constantly train our eye, go hard when we practice and push ourselves to take creative risks. The purpose of the shoot Humai is doing with Nagine is to tell a story and catch a vibe but more importantly it's to practice photography. To be in a completely unfamiliar landscape creating images that evoke emotion and feel purposeful. To get better with each shoot and walk away having learned something. This is important.
And for myself this was an exercise in telling a story about a person and their day and also a chance for me to practice shooting with a drone (which is something we just added to our kit and fu*king love it). I'm constantly trying be better at storytelling and figuring out ways to create beautiful content that is engaging and fun to watch.
Hopefully we will continue to do this with some constancy and as always welcome your feedback and thoughts.
A look into the sold out Swet Shop Boys and Anik Khan show at Webster Hall in NYC.
Video by Ali Ateeq, Edit By Amna Ateeq.
Photos by Alyzeh Ashraff and Ali Ateeq.
On her birthday last year, Abir dropped a song called Girls and we loved it. This past week she released the video and it's just as fire as the track.
She held an advance screening of the video and a Q&A that we caught at the Apple Store in Williamsburg, and announced it by bringing together a #BunchaGirls to create a fun little GIF campaign that celebrates immigrant roots.
AND her week got even more dope because Apple named her New Artist of the Week. Keep killin' it Abir.
Bianca Kurian's, aka Maieli, new mix carries her distinctively warm and carefree attitude that compels her to dismiss the idea that there is any deliberate intent to provoke an emotion through her music choices. But whether consciously or not, Maieli‘s music pays homage to the fundamental ethos of her brand, BRWN HIVE. A brand that focuses on inclusivity regardless of gender or ethnicity.
Maieli’s music features a wide range of cultural references, spanning from a reference to the classic 1995 hip hop film Friday, to the more modern day Hindi movie Sanam Teri Kasam. It's beyond party music--it is an argument for embracing new attitudes and viewpoints -- being open-minded and breaking from the taboo of talking about sex or other topics Desi culture typically shies away from. But as Maieli says, "It was never my intention to evoke a certain sensation, I just wanted everyone to dance."
Listen to the exclusive mix and learn more about Bianca from our interview below:
1. Tell us a little about yourself.
I was born in East Los Angeles. My mother was born in Colombia and my father was born in India. Having a multi-cultural background and growing up in such a diverse city played a huge role in who I am today, the way I see the world, and the music I listen to. I’ve always been involved in music, I was forced into piano lessons as a kid which I am grateful for now because that really provided the base for all my other music endeavors. Right now my goal is just to spread positivity through music because it truly is a means of communicating that connects everyone regardless of age, background, religion, sexuality, or gender.
2. Agreed! 2017 is really shaping up to be an interesting time to live in, what are you most excited about this year?
I’m most excited to see how we shift in 2017 and start coming together in the music scene to create a positive change. I’m excited to see more people of color on best of lists, more women headlining festivals, more events that fundraise for a cause, more collaboration and less elitism, and safer inclusive spaces. My girl and I started BRWN HIVE as a means to share music and throw events and promote artists to encourage these things and we’re hoping to expand to a full label so I’m excited to see how BRWN HIVE evolves this year.
3. What are you listening for when you put together a mix? Share a little bit of your process.
I usually put a playlist together based on songs I’m currently listening to and then try to figure out how to make them flow together. That’s the tough part because I’m always mixing genres and I never stick to just one BPM which is a lot more challenging but interesting in my opinion. I could never just play one type of music, that’s the fun part about dj’ing is getting to experiment with mixing different sounds and tempos and trying to get it to sound like a cohesive journey
4. Who are some artists that you think are going to pop off this year?
Definitely Horsepowar, I’ve been working with her for a minute now and I’ve been witnessing her growth. She’s definitely got what it takes to go far so I’m excited to see what she does this year. Other artists that have been killing it in my opinion and will continue to do so this year are Anik Khan, Audri Nix, Jarreau Vandal, aywy, the Club Chai crew, Late Night Laggers crew, and of course our first two BRWN HIVE featured artists Phool and Talia Knight.
5. How does your culture and identity play into your current pursuits?
My culture and identity are constantly playing a role in my life whether I realize it or not. In music it definitely plays a more deliberate role. I usually try to incorporate Latin and Desi inspired music into my mixes and tracks in a way that appeals to everyone. I’m tired of any music with ethnic elements being thrown into this “world music” category (what kind of genre is world music really)… I love how favela trap and baile funk have made their way into more accessible outlets such as Soulection radio. I want to do the same for Latin and Desi music and other types of music that people might not ordinarily listen to and combine with other more familiar music and make it more accessible for all.
6. And finally, what's your HYFN?
Hmm this is a hard one, I could go on forever but let's keep it simple and go with American-Desi-Latina.
See more about Bianca at biancamaieli.com and brwnhive.com
And follow her on SoundCloud/Snapchat: @maieli + Instagram/Twitter: @yunghoneychild
Culture doesn’t change without pioneers. These 6 South Asian Instagrammers are each altering what it means to be Desi, what it means to be first and second generation, what it means to be a millennial and what those things look like together - adjusting stereotypes everyday and broadening the scope of the spaces we exist in.
@Kohinoorgasm An artist, activist, and a person who is herself in all the right ways, Kohinoorgasm is changing the game for brown girls everywhere. Her self-described pop music preaches radical self-love and speaks to the various facets of her identity. She bridges East and West in the best way - rarely do we see a hand covered in a black-lace glove in a mudra, just inches away from a belt choker necklace. In changing the game with her art, her boldness, and her often unshaven armpits, she conducts activist acts both in big ways, and in the way she lives every day. Expect photos of her beautiful friends, links to her rad music, and everything in between.
@_salvinc For the optimist and poet in you, Salvin Chalal needs to be on your feed. Speaking out against mass incarceration, xenophobia, and hate crimes he writes groundbreaking poems. He also organizes and creates poetry workshops for young individuals and writers. Involved with some of the sickest communities of spoken word artists and people of color, Chalal regularly shares poetry by other dope artists. His feed is perfect for binging, and you could spend hours reading the fantastic work he posts.
@fariha_roisin Fariha Róisín, writer and self-described "Zayn Malik scholar", has a feed that is a break from the normal IG. She features many thought provoking and sometimes satirical quotes from movies, pop culture, poems and more, working to explore what it's like to be a modern Muslim woman. Her honesty about the challenges of this, and her relationship with faith, race, and art is refreshing. When so many feeds feel fake-curated and over-filtered, her feed remains candid, often asking the hard questions we sometimes like to omit from our thinking.
@alvinabokhari A South Asian model among other things, Alvina Bokhari has been featured in campaigns for brands like Carhartt Whipp. Her style is clean-cut, her skin is fresh and glossy and she tends to rock straight long black locks. She adorns herself in chain chokers, berets, and street wear T-shirts. Catch yourself in a moment of jealousy on her feed - she’s often at cool NYC parties, in sick fits, and with henna on her long fingers.
@dothead_divinity Khusboo Gulati is an artist in various regards, but creates kick-ass illustrations on IG in working to redefine what it means to be a POC woman. In one of her works, which shows hands covered in henna controlling thunder in the sky as if they were God, she makes the claim in her art that brown women are some of the most powerful, divine individuals to exist. She preaches South Asians for BLM, and is most known for her “Brown and Lovely” poster aka her kitschy take on the infamous ‘Fair & Lovely’. Her selfies include a yellow bhindi, septum piercing and purple lipstick - mixing identity in the best way.
@vivekshraya Vivek Shraya is everything the world doesn’t want her to be - and proud of it. As a writer, among other things, she stands up for trans & POC rights and has now started in other mediums - like music - to continue to be an active organizer. Her children’s book, The Boy & The Bindi, brings up issues of gender and race identity for kids; she is pioneering engagement in and discussion around topics traditionally seen as taboo in South Asian communities. Her catchphrase, “even this ___ is white,” tries to point out how much whiteness occupies our world. She serves looks all over her feed in fulls red lips and is definitely another influencer changing the game.
These 6 Instagrammers smash barriers and make bridges in so many ways – working for change in big and little ways. In 2016, being yourself and standing up for that, if you are POC, queer, a woman, or marginalized is activism and real power. All of these individuals occupy social media in their own way, working to create positive spaces (online and IRL), build community, or just publish really cool pictures online. What's so dope is that regardless of what their content is about, it goes beyond the likes and hash tags – which is where their voices become so salient to real change.
Earlier this month Anik Khan threw an event to thank all his collaborators and supporters. It was a really great evening with a lot of positive vibes as everyone chatted over hookah and tea. He screened the documentary Vice produced on him and gave a first listen to two new songs off his new project.
What is Bad Beti? It's the idea that by being audacious and embracing yourself can sometimes lead to being judged and labeled. We often see this happen to our brown female youth when they don't fit into what's expected of them or when they push boundaries. Let's embrace our individualities and create a movement of positivity.
Our perspective on what makes a Bad Beti is simply that we support those who decide to own their decisions and live their lives how it feels right to them. This is unique to each person. A bad beti is a good beti is a beti.
The short film came to life after we heard that BabbuThePainter and Hatecopy (Babneet Lakhesar and Maria Qamar, respectively) were working on an exhibit called Bad Beti. We vibed with the message so we contacted them to collaborate with us on creating visuals for the project. After discussing the concept and visual treatment, we filmed over two days in a bathroom, on a rooftop and throughout the streets of NYC. The duo came through strong with a lot of energy and Babbu absolutely killed it on camera.
In addition, a few other key players were integral to making this happen. Working with Amaad Bhatti for the sound design was a no-brainer. He has a talented ear for heightening emotions throughs sound, which he did brilliantly through this score. Priyanka Babariya's makeup work is impeccable. Richa Kalra was on the Bad Beti support team contributing to the overall vibes.
Bringing together such a talented team resulted in some pretty fascinating imagery in the form of a short concept film, which we're thrilled to share with you today.
