FASHION'S FAVOURITE VANDAL

London-based artist Navinder Nangla is graffitiing his way into the heart of the global fashion scene through his cleverly misspelt works.

- DIVYA VENKATARAMAN

It was a Northampton garage leak that sent Navinder Nangla spinning into the stratosphere of the London fashion and art scenes. When his bibi’s shed, his makeshift studio, became unusable, he began looking for another canvas. He still needed to create but he couldn’t paint there anymore. So why not walls?

The British-Punjabi artist started tagging spaces outside fashion studios and PR agencies in London with a range of distinctively misspelt graphics: thick, bleeding lines reading ‘Fassion weak’, or ‘Fassion is my Pashion’, with red autocorrect-like squiggles under them. At the time, he was a stylist, constantly shuttling between his hometown and the city, ferrying samples back and forth from studios and shoots. He knew that people who mattered would walk by those agencies. And they did. “I had someone come up to me after a few seconds and say, ‘This is so cool,’” he tells me. “It was a lightbulb moment.”