RLT Interview #6: Tasnim Ahmed, Writer

On Bangladesh, Prada and Pedro Almodóvar.

The RLT Interview explores all the things, people, and places that have informed a person's taste and, more importantly, sense of self.

This week, I chatted with New York City-based writer Tasnim Ahmed who’s written about fashion for Vogue, Allure, i-D, The Cut, and more. She also writes her own fashion newsletter where she often muses about her love and deep knowledge of Alaia, Dries Van Noten, and Prada, as well as the people and things that have inspired them. 

Get to know Tasnim as she muses about her upbringing in London and Bangladesh, Prada, and Pedro Almodóvar. 

On Taste

My mom has always had a huge impact and influence on my sense of style and taste. I was born in London, and we lived there until I was about six, then we moved to Bangladesh. When we were living in London, we had a modest home. We weren't wealthy by any means, but it was very important, and still is, for my mom to always look her best. It's the same with my dad—always tucking his shirt into his trousers, clean-shaven, and all that. I think it's something they inherited from their parents. My grandparents on both sides also didn't have much, but they always took a lot of pride in what they had and how they presented themselves.

My mom had one black cardigan from Marks and Spencer from when I was born and one coat that a family friend, who worked at an outerwear factory, had gotten her, and she wore those things every single day. Her Marks and Spencer cardigan, I think she finally threw out when the pandemic started. I turned 30, and my mom was like, “I think I need to clean out my closet.” And I was like, “Mom, I think this 30-year-old cardigan, it’s time to get rid of it.” But I think for my parents, they always thought, “If I'm buying something, I'm going to make sure that I'm getting my money’s worth, and I’m also getting something that I know I will cherish for a very long time.” So, now whenever I go to a store or buy something online, the first thing I'll always look for is the tag. I'm always checking for what it's made of. My mom used to always do that, and she still does. So, I think my taste came from looking for the best version you can find within your means—something that isn't flashy or trendy, but versatile and timeless. My mom always told me, “Don't buy something if you can't think of five ways to wear it,” and that's basically everything I have now.

(1) At Soho Sanctuary (2) The sunroom at Villa Necchi (3) My dad and I in front of our home in Croydon.

The idea of good taste, growing up, was whatever was being flashed around, and to me, it was not tasteful. It was something that everybody in a select group had, and every single person in that group had that or a variation of it. I remember my first knowledge of Prada was the Prada... I forget what the bag is called, but it's their leather bag that's been around forever. All the rich aunties would be walking around with this gigantic Prada bag in the crook of their elbow, and it was just like, "Look at this thing I bought." That's why I used to think, "Oh God, Prada is so tacky. I don't like this at all." Even to this day, when I see that bag, I always get triggered by the memory of all the aunties that used to carry it around.

When we lived in London, my mom used to buy not many, but a couple of fashion magazines. And when we moved to Bangladesh, she maybe had all of, I want to say, 10, but I guess they were important enough to her that she brought them with her. I would always go through them. She had, I don't know if it exists anymore, Harper's and Queen, which was based in England, and then she had this one issue of Vogue that had Kate Moss in Vietnam. It was really beautiful—now, with hindsight, slightly problematic because they were also using a lot of Vietnamese people as props in the shoot. That was my first introduction to designers and luxury. But my first main encounter was when we used to go to this tailor, known as the "foreigner’s tailor" because all the people who worked at embassies would go there to get their dresses and shirts made. Sometimes we would go there to get a dress or shirt or something made. My mom was talking to him about something, and I was going through a magazine. At the time, he had a magazine with the Prada Spring 2004 collection—the tourist collection with all the tie-dye and prints of Milan, Rome, and Venice. There was this dress in the campaign that Daria Werbowy was wearing, this long, three-quarter-length sleeve tie-dye dress. I was just like, “Oh my God.” It was already a couple of years old by then—I think I was 17. I showed my mom the spread, and I was like, “I want something like this.” While we were in the shop, I saw that he had a tie-dye fabric in really weird colors, like muddy brown and dark blue, and I was like, "I want to make a maxi dress." It was a completely different style and everything, but I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this is Prada.” Weirdly enough, about a year ago, that dress popped up on The RealReal. It was on hold, and I just sat there trying to buy it, and I was finally able to get it.

On Discovery

My best friend is originally from Colombia, but she had been living in Toronto since she was 11-years-old, and she was the first friend I ever made after I moved to Toronto. We had a lot of similar interests, but at the same time, there were a lot of things that she knew and was exposed to that I wasn’t. She introduced me to Pedro Almodóvar. She mentioned, I think, it was Broken Embraces, and I was just like, “I really want to be her friend. I need to know all of her interests”. Then I actually saw Broken Embraces, and I really enjoyed that, and I thought, “I want to see more of what this director does”. I really, really love movies by Pedro Almodóvar because he’s one of the contemporary directors who really thinks about everything–-not just the script and the direction, but also the stylistic direction. His characters will be wearing Prada or Dries Van Noten, but it's all very natural. It doesn't look like, “Oh, I'm wearing Prada”, or, “Oh, I'm wearing Chanel”. It's very fitting for the character. Seeing his movies and thinking, “This looks really interesting, I wonder what this is”. For me, a lot of it is because I'm very interested in history and background, which is why I like to do a deep dive on a designer and when I get stuck on a designer, I really hone in on them. I can't say that I'm an expert on every single designer out there or that I know everything about fashion, but they're a handful of designers that I feel very passionately about because their work really resonates with me and I like to read about their histories and the histories of the things that inspired them. 

When I first met my husband, he had one pair of really great sunglasses he'd bought during a trip to California. They were by Dries. I'm supposed to be the fashion nut and I got very territorial, "Who's this designer I've never heard off??" I'm an Aries and one of the only things I know about the characteristics of an Aries is that we love to compete with ourselves, and that's how the obsession started.

(2) My husband and I.

A lot of what I see in films, a lot of things that I read about designers, inspire me. For example, The Row does a lot of things that are inspired by Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. And, I'm happy for anyone who can afford The Row, but I think I'm more interested in, “Well, they're really inspired by Miyake, I want to learn more about him”. In that process of studying, I become very obsessed with a certain designer and then I want to look at the clothes that they have, and I'll start searching eBay, Etsy, and Poshmark, and all the different resale sites. I always look to the past more than I do to the present. 

On Desire

When I was younger, desire wasn't something that I could easily access, so there was a lot of stuff that I would desire, but I didn't know how to get to it or I didn't have the money to afford it. When I was studying in Toronto for two years before I moved to the States, I was introduced to secondhand shopping and going to thrift stores. It was a completely different world for me. It just did not exist in Bangladesh, in Dhaka. I think thrifting and buying things secondhand allowed me to access desire. I desire things that are very unique, strange and different and have some kind of story. I'm less drawn to a brand new handbag, but more to something that's a bit weathered, pretty, and weird. 

(1) My best friend and I. (2) The last best thing I read.

I feel like everybody says this, but when I was a kid, I was a bit of a weirdo by my family's definition, and I never really felt like I fit in Bangladesh because a lot of my friends growing up were extremely wealthy. I was talking to my friend about how here, there's quiet luxury and stealth wealth, and if you have rich parents, you hide it. Whereas back home it, if you had money, you showed it. That didn't appeal to me. I didn't feel like I fit into that because I couldn't relate to that. I was interested in different things. A lot of the kids I grew up with were into Bollywood movies and music, and I was into watching MTV Indonesia, which came on at midnight in Bangladesh. That's how I learned about Nirvana and the Pixies and all these different things. I wouldn't say it made me feel seen, but it made me feel there's a space for weirdness and maybe I'm not as weird as I seem, and it's just all relative. 

On Beauty

I really think, having met a lot of people, having been through a lot of good and bad experiences, I've come to realize that you could be the most beautiful, conventionally attractive person in the room, but if the inside isn't right, if the inside isn't good, it always shows. Now, it's like it's instinctual to me. I grew up thinking that I wasn't beautiful, and I felt very uncomfortable saying, “I'm very pretty” or “I'm very attractive,” or even accepting that I, along with everybody else, that we're all beautiful. It was because we had very colonial standards of beauty—fair skin, slender noses, big eyes, full lips—and I didn't fit that. I didn't feel very attractive. Over time, now, having met so many different beautiful individuals, we're all people who, if you walked into some fashion magazine today, they wouldn't peg us for what the standard of beauty should be. But I think naturally defying that standard makes us all the more special.

(2) My cat, Kochi

I am very drawn to things that are slightly off, that might not always make sense to a lot of people or might not make sense in first impressions. When it comes to art, when it comes to the books I read, I enjoy reading things that have an element of darkness or strangeness. I’m not readily drawn to light and frothy and fun and simple, easy things; I like things that have a bit more complexity. It's fun to be able to interpret that complexity, and it might be different to somebody else's interpretation of it.

On Pleasure

I have an issue with doing things for pleasure; it's what I work through in therapy. I don't really make a lot of time for pleasure or things that are pleasurable to me, but when I do, it’s usually watching a film or just sitting down in complete silence and reading a book or listening to a record. My husband and I, we'll buy records and we'll look at the cover and be like, “I've never heard of this thing and it's 9.99; we're going to buy it”. 

(1) Me with my mum, grandmother, and great-grandmother (2) At Fondazione Prada

What's the last thing you did for pleasure?
I went out for a walk and I bought myself two books. 

What's the last thing you bought?
A navy Prada sweater from The Real Real that looks a bit like a cardigan from the Spring 2023 collection.

What's the last thing you discovered?
Reading about Alaia and going through his archives, and then reading more about the women who really impacted him. I ended up buying this book about his friend Leila Menchari, who is a very unappreciated figure in the fashion industry. She was the window dresser for Hermes for about 50 years, and it's a beautiful book about her work at Hermes.

What's the last thing you read?
The Language of Fashion. I went to the New School to begin a master's program a couple years ago, and there's a lot of jargon that liberal arts institutions use that they assume everybody knows about. I walked in and I was like, “What does agency mean? What does semantics mean? What does this mean? What does that mean?”  This book operates on the assumption that you understand what these things mean, so I'm looking up definitions and then writing them in the margin to make sure I actually remember what I'm reading.

What's the last thing you watched or saw?
I have watched an absurd number of Industry episodes in one sitting.

What are you coveting right now?
Pretty much everything on my Real Real obsessions list. 

What's the last thing you disliked?
Everything happening in the world right now.

What are five cultural things that have informed who you are today?
My Bengali culture, my heritage, my Muslim identity. Even though I'm not the world's greatest Muslim or a very practicing one, it has a very deep cultural meaning for me.

Books and movies. I grew up in a very strict household, so it was a way for me to travel without ever leaving my home. One of the most glamorous movies to me was Funny Face, it made the fashion industry seem incredible. I rewatch that at least once a year. 

All the things I read growing up, like The Secret Seven Books by Enid Blyton and even The Baby-sitters Club. It allowed me to imagine possibilities for myself. 

Miuccia Prada is someone who's deeply fascinating to me, from her youth until who she is now, and even the contradictions within her own identity, where she was a young communist and she's also a billionaire. It's very fascinating to me. Her love of art, of film, of fashion, of books, of philosophy is very inspiring, and it makes me realize, “Fashion isn’t just about looking at clothes and buying clothes, but also developing your interests outside of fashion”.

What do you smell?
Right now, I smell like Little Flower by Regime des Fleur. I've never really been a big perfume person, mostly, I get very overwhelmed by all the different scents. But I got a sample once, and I really, really love the smell of it. I finally relented and ended up buying the whole bottle. It's lovely.

What's one thing in your closet that you'll never get rid of?
I am not a pack rat, and I don't buy that many things, so right now, all the stuff that I have, I don't think I would give up on a lot of it easily. Maybe the one thing that I would fight somebody for is this Prada coat that I have from the fall 2007 collection, it's one of my favorite fall collections of theirs. It's a very weird acid green and gray color. I love it. I got it at a ludicrously affordable price, and I have not seen a price like that ever since. I found it on eBay. I'm going to the grave in that coat.

What's something you spent a lot of money on that was worth it?
Loewe balloon trousers. A lot of designers do not design pants for women who have hips; these have an elastic waist, but they don't feel like, “Oh, I'm wearing elasticated pants”. They fit perfectly. They're really comfortable and beautiful, and I wear them pretty all year round.

What's something you spent a lot of money on that wasn't worth it?
I don't think I've actually felt that way about anything because I’m really deliberate, so much so to the point of often missing out on something good. Money is hard earned, so before I buy something, I need to be a thousand percent sure about what I want.

What’s something you always gift or recommend to someone?
When I give gifts, I'm thinking of a combination of one's personality, their needs and desires, so it's always a bit different. I will say that when I'm looking for a gift for my mum, who is one of the most particular people I know, I go to Tory Burch. My mum has been enjoying the Tory renaissance. For my best friend, she jokes that she never buys dresses anymore because I do her dress shopping for her. I like to also gift her with bits and bobs from Simone Rocha when I can. 

This is probably a bit ridiculous, but when I get asked for recommendations it's usually for a dry cleaner or tailor, and I always say Kingbridge. That and Soho Sanctuary for massages!

What does it mean to have taste?
Having curiosity and being okay with surrendering to that curiosity; being okay with imperfection and not fitting the mold, not being very conventional, but having your own identity and letting your own personality shine through.

All photos are courtesy of Tasnim.