Profile: Alifa Muthmainnah – Real Leather Design Competitions

Alifa Muthmainnah

BINUS Northumbria School of Design (BNSD) (Jakarta)

Alifa Muthmainnah is a fashion designer whose practice explores her Indonesian heritage through sartorial lenses. She reinterpreted her roots into experimental contemporary design using the pattern reconstruction approach. Currently studying fashion design at Northumbria University and Binus International University, she has developed a research-driven design that balances heritage, garment construction, fashion history, and an in-depth understanding of fashion commerciality. Growing up in a traditional household in rural Indonesia before moving to a city and undergoing an international academic setting has shaped her perspective on narratives on culture as a living tradition that continues to evolve and narrate fashion through cultural exchange. This understanding guides her ongoing exploration of traditional Indonesian clothing craftsmanship as a source of inspiration for her recent works. Her work treats heritage not as superficial ornamentation but rather as a conceptual foundation of design. Through understanding the basic construction of the Indonesian traditional sartorial silhouette, she transforms the silhouette, proportion, and philosophy into a contemporary collection. The approach has shaped her recent graduate collection, shaped by her constant feeling of being an outsider in a predominantly homogenous community. Reflecting her interest in presenting heritage-based design with a global context, her collections have been showcased at multiple international events such as the London Graduate Fashion Week 2025 and the HKTDC Hong Kong 2025. She frequently collaborated with local Indonesian artisans and textile manufacturers, which has gained her experience in developing collections that bridge modern markets and authenticity. Alifa hopes to continue fostering a cross-cultural dialogue between her Indonesian sartorial traditions and global fashion practices. Creating spaces for and helping voice marginalised communities through art.

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AUTUMN/WINTER 27 "THE ODD ONE OUT OF TIME"

Category: Apparel

Competitions: International

‘The odd one out of time', an A/W2027 collection, explores menswear as a space of cultural confrontation, addressing the experience of constantly feeling like an outsider being a cultural minority, despite the effort to fit in within a homogeneous Western upper-class society. It is reflected through the assimilated lifestyle of Indo's community, and the progressive Indonesian sartorial revolution movement during colonial era in the early 1900s, which birthed a new wave of fashion ensembles. Styling traditional Javanese menswear tailored jackets with European tailored pants, or European structured jackets with Javanese organic saroong draperies, were examples of fashion assimilation as a form of cultural negotiation during that time, meeting eastern cultures and Western traditions, an effort to preserve cultural identity using contrasting silhouettes. The organic and fluid construction found in the beskap jackets and saroong draperies serve as the foundation of the garment development. The construction principles are deliberately juxtaposed with the polished and highly manicured aesthetic of homogenic suburbia in the 50s and the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) archetype, which at that time was seen as ‘the pinnacle of the Western elite’. The collection is further informed by Ivy, Oxbridge Style garments such as college blazers, rowing uniforms, and preppy tailored uniforms which were associated with modern ideals of Western masculinity, class, and social privilege at that time. The collection reconciles the opposing garments using a Transformational Reconstruction (TR) pattern-cutting method. It results in designs that hybridise Javanese and Western tailoring logics, reflected through helical constructions, modular sleeve gussets, layered volumes, detachable components, bound seam details, braided jackets, and coexisting proportions between fluidity and structure. Executed in durable leather materials which still give structure yet organic drapery, such as the natural mill and nappa-finished cattle leather. Different organic materials, such as herringbone wool and cotton corduroy, are also used to line the garments.