Look around Assaad Awad’s atelier in Madrid and you’ll likely find leather straps with padlocks, handcuffs in vintage brown leather, metal gloves, Swarovski-studded human collars, leg harnesses with golden clasps attached to belts, visors with spikes all the way to the base of the neck and headpieces that can be only be likened to mufflers. At this point, you may think you’ve walked into an S&M club.
But on the screen, his images look very different. They may appear extreme but there is playful experimentation evident in the way he extends chokers to corsets, leg harnesses to stockings, breast cups to chained belts.
As we talk, Awad admits that much of his first collection was inspired by fetish objects. “I’m fascinated by fetish. I wanted to do the things I liked most, knowing who I would attract. At the start of my career, I created the most aggressive imagery, so that I could stand out. But my latest collection has much more feminine silhouettes.”
Awad ended up a designer almost completely by chance. Initially training to become an architect, he wound up in advertising and after twelve years in the business in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, someone he gave his business card to at an event inviting him to Spain to work for a British company. That was in 2009. They were working with banks. “It had something to do with playing on the senses of customers and employees and improving the banks’ layout, like where the ATM should be placed,” Awad explains, if a bit vaguely.
And so he found himself in a city that was similar to his hometown, Beirut. “You can make friends in bars,” he tells me, “It’s a friendly, open city. And one crazy morning, I decided that I wanted to create things, extraordinary things. It was a dormant need to mix up materials, metal with hand-sewn leather and chiffon.”
His first move was to set up his 5 x 5 metre workshop space. And like that, Assad Awad fell, or has he puts it, was ‘pushed’ into fashion. Despite the career in advertising, he had always known that he wanted to work with his hands. His family had moved to the north of Sweden when he was growing up, a place known for its woodworking industry.
“I made my first skateboard when I was 17. I’ve always been a handyman. When I was 6, someone gave me a Rubik’s Cube to figure out. Instead of turning the different parts around to solve it, I simply removed the stickers to match the colours,” he pauses, “I have my ways.”
As pleasant as it is speaking with him, Awad’s work displays a certain darkness, a morbid imagination, of demons and dreams, especially his first creations. These were what he calls “conceptual costumes”, which he made for fashion shows and videos; metallic robots, space troopers and urban invaders and frightening insects, including a giant praying mantis. After seeing one of his robot costumes, Lady Gaga’s stylist contacted Awad and he landed his first order for her appearance on the Graham Norton show in London. It was all fishnets and leather, with Awad’s custom-made Stardom harnesses – a leather and crystal concoction with a diamond star in the centre - gracing every dancer’s torso, including Gaga’s.
The singer was evidently impressed. In 2011, Awad was asked to dress her for a performance at the Cannes Film Festival. The Golden Restraint was born. A harness made of gold leather and chains, with silver studs and crystals at its base. The flamboyance of it guaranteed Awad’s name would be remembered.
Although Awad claims he left his studies in architecture and moved to graphic arts because architecture was too rigid in the way things must be built, at first sight, it seems to me that most of his accessories contain the body in a very architectural way. He begs to differ. “Since I didn’t study fashion, I tend to not observe the boundaries of the field and so the accessories I make almost invade the body, becoming dress-like. You have the padlocked bag, for example. It looks like it’s all locked up but it’s the only bag in my collection where you can take out the pouch so that it is two independent pieces.”
Awad’s concept of freedom within restraints was neatly underscored in a 2012 photo shoot with Mario Testino for V Magazine called ‘Battle Lines’. The two models – Adriana Lima and Doutzen Kroes – were dressed in tight corset-like leather straps but with so much space between them, that they enabled, rather than restricted movement. It was also clearly manifested in his spring-summer 2013 collection, Medusa.
When I ask him to explain how freedom of movement applies to Medusa (the snake-headed Greek Gorgon), which includes half-bodysuits made out of mostly skin-tight latex, he tells me that “Medusa is something beautiful that you cannot touch but she is just protecting herself. Latex protects you from the outside world and you have to lubricate it in order for it to be wearable, so that is what I did. The motion is hidden.”
The black, ornamental headpieces that the models wear in this collection, the dangling chains and tentacular strips of leather, all give them the look of warriors, even though bound, demonstrating a thin line that exists between the appearance of power and oppression. “I would say that 95 per cent of my clients are from the sex industry, women who dominate the most powerful men in the world,” he adds.
After working with the American singer, Awad wanted to change his image a bit. “When you work with Gaga, your whole world is painted Gaga,” he explains. So his pieces for Thierry Mugler’s spring-summer 2012 collection had a clean, minimalist look, mostly futuristic, metallic chokers, with head coverings that hid the eyes, slickly and sharply cut.
Then Awad had the opportunity to work with the Queen of Controversy herself when he was invited to dress Madonna and her crew for a Superbowl performance in 2012, kitting them out in Roman-style armour. “That was breathtaking,” he says of the experience. “Imagine that these pieces were created in my small atelier. I sat working on them with my two assistants, next to my can of Coke.”
As we move on to his latest collection, 2014’s Meteor, which includes white fabrics as well as faux black leather, dashes of silver-grey and red, sheer and transparent fabrics for added lightness, Awad says that he was inspired by a Japanese look; geisha shoes and helmet-style hats. Perhaps the greatest piece in this collection is a white dress made entirely out of white wood from Galicia, which is shaved into such fine, soft layers that it’s impossible to tell it is made from something normally so unyielding. “I like the contradiction,” he continues, “of wood appearing light, like feathers or hair. I even made a wig out of it.”
In a flawless segue, we move on to the more frivolous topic of Awad’s own hairstyle. He always sports a trimmed black beard and shaved head. “It’s my don’t mess with me look,” he laughs, “but I’m a softie inside. Can you imagine me looking like this 20 years ago in Beirut?”
This reminds me of what he’d said earlier about his fascination with jellyfish and octopus. “It’s like meeting someone you find attractive but who you don’t know. In the beginning, you’re terrified. Until your first laugh.”
