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Selections, like 23-year-old Grammy winner Mustafa's poignant line, pictured above, appear on the clothing itself. In an ode to freedom of expression, Valentino creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli commissioned poets Greta Bellamacina, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Robert Montgomery, and Mustafa the Poet for original work, which was collected in a slim volume called On Love. () Photograph by Dario Calmese Styled by Nicole Chapoteau. (Valentino boutiques nationwide) MOUNSER earring, $150. There's a narrative in the media that insinuates that the victims deserved to die.Alvin Ailey’s Courtney Celeste Spears and Jeroboam Bozeman, photographed in New York City. When you get lost to gun violence, there’s a stigma. So I'm basically interviewing different rappers from across Toronto, and they gave me these really beautiful responses. And I realized that while we're still here, it's important to account for that memory. I had a conversation with Drake about how much violence there is in the city, and I realized when we pass away, people don't remember us in the way that we should be remembered. I'm also working on a short film for my city called Remember Me Toronto with Drake and 40, who is scoring the project. I'm working on a music project now that's being executive produced by Frank Dukes.
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It gave me a little bit of a boost to work harder and to focus more on what it is that I want to create. Obviously this guy is the Don of the city, but it was definitely effective. He was following me at the time, which gave me excitement.
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I think at the time there weren’t a lot of artists that he was co-signing from the city. I wanted to present poetry that was personal to me and resonated with me and continued to tell that storyĭrake posted your poem to his Instagram account a couple years ago. I think with the experience, perhaps seeing Pierpaolo Piccioli use 43 black women in the couture show, which is the most black women ever used in a couture show, and seeing how he was breaking barriers with race, I thought this collaboration could have been another example of that. I really wanted to make sure that if this was going to happen, I just wanted to make sure that my words weren’t being compromised in the process. This is your first time working with a luxury brand.
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I was only supposed to have 10 pieces in the collection, but it ended up being 25. Like, “I thought I was too dark until I stretched into a galaxy.” I wanted to offer hope. A lot of what I was writing came from the perspective of black love and what that meant to me. From that, and understanding that my words would be on pieces of clothing, I started writing. Then he wanted to have more of a conversation about what a collection would look like and the imagery he wanted to use. I didn't even know at the time what the womenswear collection was going to be, but through our conversations, he developed three different mood boards around three of my poems. We started by talking about our shared interest in romantic poetry. What was the process of working with Piccioli? Here, Ahmed talks about what it was like working with a luxury brand, how he transitioned from poet to songwriter to singer, and the documentary about Toronto he's working on with Drake. This is a new world for Ahmed, who began performing spoken word as a child before starting the Halal Gang, a collective of artists from Toronto made up of Ahmed, Puffy L’z, Mo-G, Safe, and Smoke Dawg, who was murdered last year. Ahmed's poetry was embroidered on 25 pieces in the collection. But after receiving a DM from the Maison Valentino Instagram account, which he initially ignored, he learned about the significance of the luxury house from his model friends.įrom there, Ahmed, who goes by Mustafa the Poet, started a relationship with the brand, which began with a video collaboration for the men's fall 2019 show, then attending the women's couture show, and finally collaborating directly with Piccioli on the women's fall 2019 collection. While many luxury brands have attached themselves to activism, streetwear and "cool things" in ways that don’t always feel believable, Pierpaolo Piccioli, the creative director of Valentino, has made the collection feel relevant in meaningful ways-whether that's co-designing pieces for the men's fall 2019 collection with Undercover’s Jun Takahashi or featuring 43 black models in the spring/summer 2019 women's couture collection.Īs recently as a year ago, Mustafa Ahmed, a 23-year-old poet, singer, and songwriter from Toronto who has worked with artists including Drake, the Weeknd, Daniel Caesar and Camila Cabello, didn't know what Valentino was.