by Carolyn Hart 

Photography: Emma Hardy

Freelance journalists working from home seldom get out of their pyjamas before 6pm, and only then if they’re having a drink in the kind of bar that calls for heels rather than slippers. So it’s unnerving to be sent off to visit a fashion designer before noon, especially one as distinguished as Osman Yousefzada, a man who dresses the A list in swooningly chic and sophisticated clothes.

“Where did your dress come from?” he says accusingly as I step through his front door. High street, I expect, not that I’m telling him…
“I want to do a range of basics,” he says. “And that dress is really basic.” 

 “It’s organic cotton,” I bluster, trying to retrieve the situation.

“No it’s not,”he says. We spend some time searching for the label to prove me, or more likely him, right.

“Nothing’s really organic,”he tells me sadly.Luckily, we’re now in the kitchen, where Osman is going to cook lunch, and the organic credentials or otherwise of the dress are forgotten because the vital lunchtime component that Osman put in the fridge earlier to set has failed to do so.
“Do you think it matters?”he asks me.

“Not in the slightest,”

I say.

“Put it back in the fridge for a bit and see what happens.”His kitchen, a tiny square of a room decked out in fashionable white and black, and overlooking a panorama of roof tops and fire escapes high above Cromwell Road, is delightful – full of jars of exotic-looking ingredients, herbs and spices and cookbooks called things like Cooking with Mickey and the Chefs of Walt Disney World Resort. While we wait, Osman has a cigarette and a large glass of his wonder drug, which he found in Sri Lanka (“It’s got things like berocca and liquorice in it for colds,”), and attempts – since I seem to  know nothing about it -to explain fashion to me. 

“It’s all in the fold,”he tells me, handing me pictures of glorious tribal clothes, Rajasthani jackets and Japanese kimonos, which have influenced his own rather stunning creations. 

“I love the simplicity of that,” he says, pointing to a picture of a 19th-century peasant in a sack. “I’d take that and turn it into a skirt.” 

Back in the kitchen, things are beginning to solidify. Osman explains the origins of his dish. “It’s called chakri, which is a Ghanaian dessert made from couscous, coconut, raisins or sultanas and pistachios with yoghurt and cream and peaches and mangoes.” He learned how to make it from a girl with whom he once shared a flat. “She made it all the time, then her gangster boyfriend got shot and she stopped cooking.” 

Chakri, he says, reminds him of having lots of people round, of parties, and of getting together with his family in Birmingham. “My parents are Afghans and cooked something similar. It’s very quick and easy to make in fashion week, and it’s comforting.” 

Growing up as an Afghan child  in Birmingham made Osman feel always on the outside looking in. His father was a carpenter, his mother a dressmaker. “I was a little boy who made frocks,” he says. “My three brothers became a surgeon, a lecturer and a spinal doctor. Me and the sister who’s a housewife are considered the dodgy ones…” 

Dodgy or not, his clothes are beautiful, draped and sculptural in pale, cool colours. The simplicity of the chakri, when it eventually emerges from the fridge, echoes the cool, rich folds of his clothes. It’s delicious, both creamy and refreshing, and the couscous and coconut combination is a revelation. Piling on the fruit makes it a terrific fashionista’s dish, too. We eat it in Osman’s sitting room as the sun lingers, bathing in its rosy light his eccentric collection of furniture culled from all points of the compass, while the plangent notes from an old-fashioned gramophone drift out to meet the roar from the road below. 

“It’s an intellectual food from an intellectual fashion designer,” says Osman modestly as we tuck in. I think he’s right.
To find out the recipe for Osman’s dish go to www.dailyrubbish.co.uk. 

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