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Alon Sheleg: Can you start by telling me a bit about the studio?

Dilan Lurr: Our studio is located in the 11th arrondissement in Paris, in a space that was formerly a small oil painting school. It’s located in this impasse reserved by the city for creative fields, so there are architects and graphic designers on the street in the neighbouring buildings. We took it over one and a half years ago, and it serves as our office, atelier, studio and showroom all at once — a lot is happening in one place. We had to renovate it for over two months because it was quite run-down. We did it in stages because we knew we were leaving Antwerp and had a very short window of time.

AS: And you’re fully done with the renovations now?

DL: There are constantly small things you want to improve and change; it’s never really perfect. A fashion studio just never stops needing more storage, so that’s a constant challenge. We’re already thinking of renovating again, but we’re really happy here. I also live in the neighbourhood, ten minutes away on foot, so I walk up every morning. It’s really nice.

AS: Why did you move from Antwerp?

DL: We were in Paris a lot, and the only thing keeping us in Antwerp at first was the manufacturing for Namacheko. We were under a licence deal with a big Belgian company called Gysemans Group. Once we moved our production to Italy, we didn’t need to stay there anymore.

AS: How do you think your time in Antwerp shaped the identity of the brand?

DL: Before moving to Antwerp, I was already influenced by it. Growing up, I was drawn to Antwerp designers like Raf Simons, Martin Margiela and Haider Ackermann — they were the ones I looked up to. But the city itself is not the romantic vision some people have of it as this massive creative hub. I’m originally from a small city in Sweden called Halmstad with a population of only 90,000. So, I like having a calm environment; it allows my creativity to thrive. In a place like Antwerp, which is compact but possesses the energy of a big city, I was able to find that quiet space for myself. I lived in one building, and my office was right in the courtyard, so I never needed to go anywhere. I lived there for six years, and I wanted to make our living and working situation in Paris as close to that as possible.

AS: Looking around the space, here you have this ceiling fixture. Can you tell more about it?

DL: It’s a mille-feuille ceiling fixture inspired by Oscar Niemeyer. We managed to get a good number of square metres of ceiling that we then adapted to the space. The Espace Niemeyer was synonymous with Namacheko; we showed there for almost eight years, put on seven shows and held our showroom there too every season. In their basement, we had a little room where we would store all our rails and archives. I wanted to bring a piece of that history with me. Beyond that, in terms of the interior space, I wanted Scandinavian design. Everything here is Scandinavian.

AS: Are there any specific industrial or furniture designers you wanted?

DL: It’s mainly three or four designers. The most famous is Alvar Aalto, alongside Bruno Mathsson and Ilmari Tapiovaara. Then there is a lighting designer who isn’t widely known to the public, but is heavily collected: Hans-Agne Jakobsson. He’s from about half an hour away from where I grew up, and he designed these lamps called Tratten, among others. I wanted to feature mainly Swedish design, but also pieces from Finland, to represent my background. These are the objects I live with at home as well, so it felt natural.

AS: Does industrial design influence your collection?

DL: Absolutely. I like the practicality of the pieces. There is a real complexity to how they are constructed, but they remain very easy for everyday use, and you can move them out of the way in an instant. In a space like this we have to be flexible; some days it’s a photo studio, other days we have to empty the room entirely. With designers from that era, almost everything is modular. And I want my collections to serve a practical function in that same way. There is an obvious complexity of the garment’s construction or the underlying inspiration, but the clothes themselves are recognisable items that serve a daily purpose.

AS: Is practicality always your baseline?

DL: Yes, though not explicitly; it’s just my default mode. I studied civil engineering, and a big portion of my schooling was calculating building materials. Automatically, I became quite practical in how I think, but it’s never the literal starting point for a collection.

AS: What is the starting point for your creative process? Where do you source your references?

DL: My primary starting point is looking through photo books and films; Paul Schrader films in particular. Early on in my career, I put a lot of pressure on myself to declare: ‘This is the Tarkovsky collection,’ or ‘This references the artist Evan Holloway.’ Now, I don’t care. Rather than basing the inspiration on one tiny isolated detail, I’m much more interested in a collection that can reference many details and references at once, building a standalone narrative across the board.

AS: There are many books in your studio. How have you selected those titles?

DL: I bring my own books from home because we have launched a curated bookstore alongside our online shop, and I keep a number of these books here. This one is Skin Paintings by a friend of mine, the visual artist Calvin Marcus, and this book here, called Carnival Strippers, is by Susan Meiselas, an incredible photographer I discovered when I was 16 while growing up in Sweden. I was seeking ways to connect with my Kurdish roots, where I was born, and Meiselas published a photographic and archival documentation of the Kurdish people, which helped me get answers when I started to question myself about what a Kurdish person actually is.

AS: Has any book here recently inspired your designs?

DL: This book called Rizzoli/Electa 2020, is about an artist I love named Alma Allen. He’s quite established now; he just showed at the Venice Biennale 2026. As buttons and small accessories are vital to me, his sculptures provide incredible surface references for our hardware, jewellery textures and custom zip-pullers. Some seasons I strip it back, but other seasons I will develop massive custom zip-pullers or ceramic buttons.

AS: Where did the impulse to launch a bookstore come from?

DL: I’m an avid auction buyer. At book auctions, you are often forced to buy a mixed lot of ten books just to get the two specific volumes you actually want. Over the years, I accumulated a massive stack of duplicates. I looked at them one day and figured we should create a webshop for the extra copies. Once we launched it, I realised it was actually a non-aggressive way to communicate our brand universe. Instead of shoving a mood board in our customer’s face and saying, the audience can simply browse the shop, read the titles and absorb the imagery and literature that feeds the house. Our audience has received it very well, and the ones that are first selling are always a surprise to us. Someone will buy a super obscure, highly specific architectural book, and we’ll just stand there wondering how anyone even knows this book existed.

AS: Do you have a personal favourite among the titles?

DL: My absolute favourite book is Twilight by Gregory Crewdson. I watched a documentary called Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters detailing his process: he builds these hyper-elaborate, Hollywood-scale suburban street sets, sets the lighting for weeks and takes one single photograph. It has the staging and gravity quality of a 19th-century Romanticist painting. I was sitting in a summer house with a friend watching his film, and I knew right after that I needed to work with this man. I tracked down his contact, called him up and told him about a legendary silk mill in Lyon called Bucol. They have a specialised technique where they print an image directly onto the raw thread before it gets woven into a fabric, resulting in this incredible, shifting, painterly distortion. Crewdson was thrilled by the idea and opened up his entire archive to us. It turned into a multi-tiered collaboration; we discussed his personal cinematic references like Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper and David Cronenberg, he titled the collection and he even supplied the original soundtrack for the runway show. The campaign for his collection was shot by his eight graduate students from Yale, who took the clothes for a camping trip in the woods, and shot the collection on one another. We turned their photographs into a large-format print magazine called Somnambulism.

AS: Have you published any other printed material since then?

DL: We did. Crewdson actually passed that copy of Somnambulism along to his own former professor at Yale, Laurie Simmons, who then called me and said, ‘I wanted to shoot your next campaign.’ So we shipped the following season to her, and she shot a self-portrait series alongside her son, Cyrus. During our preliminary talks, she asked me what my sole point of reference for Sweden was when my family immigrated there from Iraq. I told her the only thing I knew was Pippi Longstocking [laughs.] She braided her hair down past her waist and shot an entire high-fashion campaign styled as Pippi Longstocking. And perhaps because I lacked formal fashion schooling, sourcing in photography or fine art comes intuitively to me, and inherently, a garment is more interesting if it is built on a genuine subtext.

AS: Is there an object or a piece of furniture in that space that holds a higher meaning?

DL: The leather recliner in the corner is a permanent work spot. I sit in that chair for five hours a day, answering emails, sketching or reading — I do it all there. Beyond that, my eye for furniture has shifted recently because I just became a father. You start looking at a space entirely differently.

AS: How has fatherhood informed the inspiration of your Spring Summer 2027 collection?

DL: The theme of the new collection came from a thought about my son and how we construct the identity of a boy. We explored the mid-century silhouette of young boys and the mechanics of how masculinity is being manufactured. Fifty years ago, society dressed seven-year-old boys in rigid, three-piece tailored suits paired with high wool shorts. I wanted to take that bizarre, highly idealised concept of a miniature man and break it apart. My initial instinct wasn’t to create a collection based on my new child; it happened as an unconscious byproduct of my research back in December. We were initially told we were having a girl, and when the scan came back as a boy, my brain kicked into an absolute panic trying to visualise what raising a male looked like. Since my brother and I are grown, there hasn’t been a child in our family circle for decades. When I started pulling vintage tailoring and mathematically scaling the lapels and shoulders down to a 1950s child’s proportions, the geometry became entirely cartoonish. That became the starting point for the outerwear.

AS: Is there a piece in particular from the collection that you feel closer to?

DL: I design a new double-breasted jacket every single season, inspired by my father, who wore a tailored double-breasted suit every single day as a young kid in Kurdistan. My absolute earliest memory of clothing is sitting inside his local tailor’s shop, watching him get fitted. This season, I designed the double-breasted striped blazer in a grey chalk-stripe.

AS: How has your father shaped your creative path?

DL: My father is a master jeweller. He started working in it when he was 11 years old, and our entire extended family works in the field as well. He has immense pride in the craft, doing a job entirely by hand and doing it correctly. In the Middle East, the cultural expectation is that a son inherits his father’s trade. If your father is a butcher, you cut meat; if he sells rugs, you sell rugs. I reflect on that constantly. Had my family remained in Iraq, my life would have been spent behind the counter of our family shop, selling gold jewellery to young couples getting married. I’m actually expanding our jewellery line significantly; designing jewellery today is my way of fulfilling my lineage.

AS: Did you ever conceive that as a civil engineering student sitting in Paris, you would run a fashion brand?

DL: Never. Not in my wildest daydream.

AS: In January, the brand will celebrate its ten-year anniversary. Do you have any future plans for Namacheko?

DL: My focus now is on the Spring Summer 2027 show. The 48 hours leading up to a show are a nightmare of logistics, but the ten minutes the clothes are walking down the runway are the greatest feeling on earth. My only job right now is keeping the room calm so the studio can actually enjoy it. Once the venue clears out, I have to sit down and face the reality that the brand will turn ten in January. I’m profoundly proud that we kept an independent house alive for a decade, but it also scares me.

AS: Scary in what sense?

DL: Keeping an independent fashion brand alive requires a lot of time away from your personal life. If you open a bakery or an auto shop, it takes your weekends; if you launch a fashion label, it takes your identity. Standing at the ten-year mark is wonderful because the clothes survived, but it forces you to look at the calendar and realise how much time you spent making garments.

Photography by Kaj Lehner.