Yahoo Finance The Sexy Sincerity of Maryam Nassir Zadeh
Maryam Nassir Zadeh has a way of making everything look strangely beautiful: visible nipples, paper bags, untidy bedrooms. On her website, where she sells the clothing line she launched in 2012 alongside brands like Telfar, Jacquemus, andCristaseya, product imagery is styled with the kind of errant poetry that city living creates. A woman modeling a white miniskirt displays its back not through a rote, commercially-minded pose from behind, but by twisting around like she’s in the middle of undressing at the city pool, tenderly pulling up her shirt. A pair of sandals is pictured on a white paper shopping bag seemingly discarded on the street. A T-shirt is shown on a girl lounging in the stairs of a basement bar bathroom.
Even the way that Nassir Zadeh arrives at a restaurant, such as when she streams into Balthazar with a beatific smile on a recent weekday morning, has a compellingly ineffable feel. Her long slightly curly hair tumbles down her back and her skin glows, and she’s wearing perspex wedge heels of her own design and a Prada fanny pack looped around a white racerback tank dress. “I wear it to bed,” she says of the dress. So she’s wearing her pajamas? “This wasn’t meant to be me being stylish. It was more about being comfortable.” The dress is clingy, in other words, but leaves something to the imagination.
Leaving something to the imagination is the MNZ remit. It’s difficult to explain what her brand, which launched as an airy multi-designer store on Norfolk and Rivington in 2008, means to a certain subset of women who are fanatical about her world and clothes. “She is like the wind embodied,” one fashion editor in her early thirties recently rhapsodized to me.
“I do have the highest standards of beauty,” Nassir Zadeh says. “I don’t mean perfection beauty. I mean like, beauty is joy for me. And I don’t skimp on that.” She doesn’t care about what feels digestible or relatable; “it’s more just feeling that you’re sincere with it.”
Her aesthetic is so potent that her store’s e-commerce imagery was the subject of an academic paper in 2019 by Rosie Findlay, cited as an example of what Findlay called “aspirational realness.” Brands like MNZ, Glossier, and Reformation, Findlay argued, cultivate a sense of “unstudied cool” with imperfect photography, casual posing, and no makeup-makeup in order “to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.”
What’s intriguing about Zadeh’s place in this orbit, though, is that while Glossier and Reformation have scaled up and taken their ideas national, even global, Zadeh’s brand remains, 14 years after the store opened, strikingly close to its origins. True, the business is much larger—her own brand sells on Ssense and FarFetch, and she opened a store in Paris earlier this year—but there remains something resolutely underground about the enterprise. Even when she launched an NFT a few weeks ago, it was done with her own MNZ-ish spin, with a rendering of the Instagram famous all-white apartment she sublets in Noho. “It was a good opportunity for us because we always need people to be sponsoring us, because we're such an independent business and it's still tough for us,” she explains. “But I feel like we have so much integrity that like, if we’re gonna do something, we are really going to think about how we can make it really cool and how we can make it beautiful.”
“I feel like we don’t ever want to sell out,” she continues, sipping occasionally from a big warm bowl of non-dairy milk. “I feel like if we even did something like—and this is not selling out—if we were ever asked to do something for [a company like] Uniqlo, we would hopefully make that into a beautiful, exciting thing.”
Beauty is something that Nassir Zadeh talks about a lot. What is beautiful in her world? Travel. Long hair. Blurry photos. See-through clothes—nipples and underwear are often present on her site and Instagram and in her runway styling—and light, summery ones, even in the dead of winter. She has an eye for the crunchy or nubby fabric or the slightly off-piste detail that shifts the mood of an entire image or outfit from something understated to something sensually unfamiliar or even uncomfortable.
“I love to feel that my aesthetic has a purity to it,” she says. “There’s a freshness. I love things that are really clean and I love things that are natural. I love textiles, I love towels, and I love cottons. And then I feel, in my home, it’s all about the light. And I love the beach. There’s something about the aesthetic that feels minimal and pure, which is always something that I’m attracted to in my own designs.”
Her eye has proven prescient, even as it remains elusive. She was one of the first stores to carry Telfar Clemens’s designs, and Eckhaus Latta’s, as well. She has built a community around these designers and others; her shows feature musicians like Ian Isaiah and Dev Hynes, employees at Supreme, and artists and designers like Andre Walker in the front row as well as on the runway. She often travels with friends, and spent this past summer hopping around Greece and Turkey and Paris. Sometimes her two daughters travel with her—Nassir Zadeh and her husband, Uday Kak, are divorced, though remain on good terms—and sometimes they stay with her parents, whom she warmly describes as “helping me raise them.”
Part of Nassir Zadeh’s appeal, and the way her aesthetic proliferates, is her Instagram, which she calls “almost, like, one of my biggest jobs.” The brand’s Instagram is also her personal account, such that collection lookbook images appear right alongside Nassir Zadeh in a white button-up shirt tucked into a sheer black fabric (location tag: Athens, Greece), and her daughter napping next to a snowpea green Hermes Evelyne bag, and her father and ex-husband napping on soft spaces around in her Noho loft.
“There’s a part of me that wishes social media, like in a few years, would just die,” she says. “And would be completely obliterated, because I feel like everything that I do, like when I take pictures of people, it's very much my art. I’m not doing it for social media, I’m doing it because it’s a passion of mine to capture people that I love wholeheartedly.” She thinks of it like a diary. “I’m trying to be thorough with it, and I want it to be authentic, but it takes time to sort of curate it.” Most people probably approach it more strategically, she adds, thinking of how best to use the platform to communicate. “But I really do it more for myself. I don’t do it for commercial reasons because if I did, it would be very different.”
Earlier in our conversation, she spoke about looking back through old selfies on the account, at how she was dressing a few years ago—brighter colors, more layers. Now she’s more minimalist, almost rigid, she reflected, and she likes this newer style but found herself missing that old energy. That kind of distinctly feminine introspection—navel-gazing through the trappings of clothing and hair and makeup and perfumes and feelings—seems right at the heart of the appeal of Nassir Zadeh and her brand. She treats the ephemeral with a god-like reverence; even things like towels, blankets, fruits, and dusk skies in far-flung locations seem mystically “on-brand.” Often the clothes she wears on Instagram don’t even really appear to be clothes.
Nassir Zadeh has managed to do something that seems impossible: she describes her Instagram presence as “really natural and real”—and indeed, it feels as though it is. Even the most cynical scroller can’t help but be intrigued, puzzled, dazzled, or all of the above by the images she shares. “What’s the deal with her Instagram!” a number of fashion observers asked me when I mentioned that I was working on this piece. “It’s kind of freaky,” she admits, “because I’m not filtering so hardcore.”
Her life, in other words, is the work of art that is the brand. Very few people of means these days—people who travel and wear awesome outfits and post about it online—actually seem to have any taste. Influencer culture, plus the pure banality of extreme wealth, mean that people on Instagram are usually just racing to post the same clothes, vacation images, or even people. Rarely does one feel an authentic sense of discovery or surprise on the platform anymore, but even when I come across Nassir Zadeh’s posts in my own feed, I’m often jolted by the odd tones of a gelato case, her frame tilting into a full-length mirror for a fit pic, and the casual background details that suggest a novelistic bourgeois bohemian B-plot. Many of New York’s young women currently seem obsessed with a mode of cerebral sexiness (“Emily Sundberg, a 28-year-old editor and filmmaker in Brooklyn, was eating spaghetti when she had a realization: She was being hot,” a recent New York Times story explained), and they seem to have adopted Nassir Zadeh as their Joan Didion babe incarnate.
For the collection that Nassir Zadeh will show on Monday afternoon, she is finally making use of some textiles she’s been shuttling between storage units for years. Some of these pieces she’s had since she was a student at Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied textile design. She and her team, along with a few students from Parsons, are patching them together into new garments, some of which will be for sale and some of which will be one-off statement pieces or artworks. “Stuff that I wanted to do for a long time creatively that I haven’t necessarily been able to infuse yet, it feels like now the time is coming for me,” she says. “I feel even as a designer, I’m grateful that I’m able to share my sensibility and have people recognize the brand in terms of the layers of what it is beyond products. But I feel like as a designer, I want to go so much further. And it’s coming, I really feel it’s coming.”
Nassir Zadeh’s instinct for community, or what she calls family, has done much to cultivate her brand into something beyond products, as she put it. She is adjacent to the fray of Dimes Square, which through a haphazard media pile-on is somehow the locus of the post-left-turned-right-wing, and yet Nassir Zadeh somehow also floats above it. In her last show, for example, she sat Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, the duo behind the controversial podcast Red Scare, in her front row. Khachiyan’s boyfriend Eli Keszler composed the show’s score, and fellow controversy-adjacent personality Ottessa Moshfegh walked in the show. Curious, then, that while these characters seem to have become somewhat infamous, Nassir Zadeh remains merely admired.
It might be because the woman behind the brand represents something else entirely. The writer and filmmaker Hailey Benton Gates, a friend of the designer, says that even though Nassir Zadeh is considered a cornerstone of the downtown scene, perhaps she resists belonging because she embodies a crucial difference between traditional bohemianism or counterculture and that of the post-left of Dimes Square: she is sincere. “Visiting Maryam can feel like being on an island on the island,” Gates texted me. “I find it funny that she has become associated with a kind of downtown scene that she shares very little with temperamentally speaking. She is not ironic or self-deprecating, she is exceedingly warm and present and something most feared by that milieu: earnest.”
Why is it, though, that so much of what begins as “cool” in New York quickly grows out of the word into something passe, while MNZ somehow remains? The old myth about making it in the Big Apple always leaves out the part where you sell out—you make a deal that compromises your value to the original fans, or you work with a celebrity who adds a new kind of cache, or you just generally dilute your vision in some way. As much as something like a Target collaboration might introduce you to a national audience, it also removes what makes you distinctly New York—which is that you are not palatable to a national audience. The fashion writer Chantal Fernandez once called Nassir Zadeh the influencer’s influencer—which is absolutely true, in the sense that her shoes are widely copied and even her outfits and style, too. But she is also the kind of person, in her strangeness, her originality, her perception of her life as a kind of artwork, who is just for the real fans.
“It is all real because I love it, and it is my life and things are not perfect,” Nassir Zadeh tells me. “But to me, it is perfect because this is life and this is natural.” She wants everything to feel more personal. “I don’t think, Oh my God, I have so many followers, people are going to see this. I just think: this is just me. This is my life.”
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