The Ordinary Art Of Belonging: In Conversation With Creative Director Humza Syed

When Humza Syed talks about home, he doesn’t mean a place. He means a feeling that’s become harder to hold on to. “America has just been tearing down and breaking apart,” he says. “It doesn’t really feel like a country or a place that we can call home anymore.”

Syed grew up in California, raised between immigrant hope and American distance. Now, as a stylist and creative director based in New York, his work circles around that tension: belonging and unbelonging, visibility and erasure. His latest project, 'R We American', begins with that question and refuses to answer it neatly.

“I wanted to show that we belong here,” he says. “Even if they try to make us feel like we don’t. We’re American, but we’re also South Asian. We have two sides, and we accept both.”

The series features his friends — all South Asian New Yorkers — sitting in parks, playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. They wear lehengas with Yankee hats, silver bangles with jerseys, Timbs with dupattas. “You see people gambling on the streets,” he said. “I wanted to do that too, but with our own elements. We’re gambling jewellery, we’re drinking chai, we’re eating sweets. We’re having a picnic, but we got a hookah. We’re us.”

The visual language mixes immigrant nostalgia with a sharp street sensibility. “I directed and styled every model,” Syed says. “I wanted to mix the New York side with the Desi side. The classic Timbs and Jordans with lehengas and jewellery.” The effect is both familiar and new, a kind of defiance.

For Syed, this defiance is political. His art is a refusal to flatten identity into something polite or ornamental. “Growing up, we had that pressure to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer,” he says. “I just want to show people, especially Desis, that you can do something creative. Feed your soul. Don’t listen to what anyone else has to say about it.”

He speaks about art like a language that needs new grammar. “We’ve normalised taking the cross and flipping it upside down,” he says. “That came from Victorian and gothic art. It’s not about Satanism anymore, it’s just an art form. So why can’t we do that with our own symbols? Take the Om symbol, take the Allah symbol, flip it, create something darker.” His intent isn’t blasphemy, but freedom. To see cultural iconography as material, not constraint. “It’s just how my brain works,” he says. “I want to bring Desi elements into darker art. You don’t gotta do the normal regular shit.”

That darker aesthetic has become central to his vision. “We’re known for being colourful, for being modest,” he says. “But I want to show a gloomier, mysterious side. We can still represent where we come from just in a way that hasn’t been seen before.”

One of his first shoots, he recalled, featured a woman styled topless from the waist up, wearing a lingo and silver bangles. “She looked divine, but dark,” he said. “Usually we’re not shown like that. We’re not black. We’re not dark. We’re not mysterious. But I wanted to show that side of us.”

In an industry where South Asians are often decorative, bright, nostalgic, apolitical, Syed’s work chooses ambiguity. His Desi figures are divine and defiant, but also bored, alienated, and real. “Sometimes it feels like I’m the only fashion creator that’s Desi,” he says. “In America and Europe, you don’t really see us in fashion the way you do other influencers. I just want to create a road where people feel like they can also do this. Make that life for themselves.”

His voice carries the urgency of someone building what he never saw growing up. “We’ve been told for so long that this is everyone’s country, that this is home,” he says. “But why don’t I feel accepted here?” The question lingers, not as despair, but as fuel.

Syed’s art holds contradiction: the immigrant’s longing and the artist’s rebellion. His message, though, is simple. “We can do this too,” he says. “Don’t underestimate us.”

If you enjoyed reading this here's more from Homegrown:

Ghost Of The Mountain' Is An Indian Cinematic Ode To The World's Most Elusive Animal

Saved By A Curse: This Documentary Shows Us Why The Chambal River Remains Pristine

A Homegrown Documentary Captures The Loss Of Koli Community's Connection With The Sea