Yeah, you got it right, my name "Malaika" means "Angel" in Swahili – a name I can thank my parents for since I grew up traveling all around the globe.
I am 29 years old now and launched my eponymous brand four years ago. Before that I worked as a designer and consultant for several Berlin based brands, as well as teaching textile technologies at ESMOD fashion school, which I still do now. Ideas kept on growing in my head, so I decided to start my own collection. By now, there are four girls on my team, Malaikaraiss is sold in fifteen stores in Europe and Asia and our own online shops ship worldwide! Our business is constantly growing new categories like jewelry to our portfolio.
From my perspective, Berlin has its own very individual style. As a designer, I see absolutely no limitations for my ideas, no boundaries. The city is a creative melting pot, there´s so much going on within the art and fashion scene that contribute to the city re-inventing itself every day. My collection and my work don’t have an exclusively commercial approach but it is really important to me. Being creative and experimental is wonderful, but a collection that actually sells and that women all over the world love to wear is even better!
My collection is high-end fashion but always with a fun-feminine twist. It's mostly inspired by the powerful women surrounding me but also style icons from the past decades, especially from the 70s. I try to integrate those vintage details into my designs to then blend them with very modern and sophisticated styles, hoping to create something unique along the process. My designs are made for a type of strong, multitasking woman who likes to feel comfortable yet fierce in what she is wearing.
That's what I would call the “fun twist” I was talking about earlier –the little things and tiny details that make us girls smile and which are affordable as well, are so important. Pieces like the Dinolove necklace just happen naturally. I grew up watching Jurassic Park and thus surrounded by T-Rex action figures, so somewhere along the way a stuffed dinosaur became the team’s lucky charm. It would sit in the front row at each one of our runway shows, when one day we were goofing around in the office and just thought "let’s turn him into a necklace". And guess what? Now he’s our best-seller!
I don´t have a specific, set-in-stone method. As an artist, your work is always influenced by one’s everyday life and the good and bad things that happen. I collect mood pictures or little snaps and bits of fabric in my sketch-book and from there I sketch most of the final looks, which I then send to the girls in the studio to develop the patterns from. Some of the challenging designs take up to twenty fittings until we can declare them perfect. I'm obsessed with surfaces and thus like to develop new structures and patterns, working and playing with contrast. Silk Crepe and fluffy yarns like Angora or Alpaca are my favorite fabrics but I´m also into high-tech fibers.
Maybe that's a first impression when you meet me or see the soft shaded color range in my collections…but if you dig deeper you'll find many strong and edgy characteristics and details about me that fit the collection just as well.
