Nabila Wirakusumah is a writer, designer and artist from Indonesia, raised in Thailand and Hong Kong, and educated in New York and Denmark.
Her multifaceted background is echoed in the variety of her creative pursuits. With 7+ years of professional experience, her career in Graphics and Illustration has spanned across multiple industries, from tech start-ups, to the toy-making world and the fashion industry. She has also worked for 4+ years as a set designer, prop stylist and art department coordinator for fashion, advertising and music videos. For the 2022-2023 academic year she was a remote teacher of creative writing at TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Armenia.
She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University for Creative Writing in Fiction and Literary Translation, as well as a monthly contributor for Tatler Indonesia since February 2023.
Since February 2023, I’ve had the immense pleasure of being a monthly contributing writer at Tatler Indonesia with a focus on articles exploring wellness, sustainability, art and design. You can read a selection of the articles published so far below.
Batik is the ancient Indonesian craft of wax-resist dyeing where intricate patterns are either hand drawn using a spouted tool called a canting (pron. tjan-ting), or stamped on with heavy copper caps (pron. tjahps). The appreciation and collection of these gorgeous fabrics was a constant in my childhood. My grandparents and relatives houses would often have closets with glass doors filled with layers and layers of textiles collected from around the country, across decades. My father has told me of how, in the past decade, more and more of his colleagues have begun to wear batik every Friday in the office. I’ve always loved going with him to the markets, and picking the cloths that he’ll get made into a shirt to wear to work.
Towards the end of 2019 I had begun to feel stagnant in my personal art, craving a medium that I could interact with in a more tangible way than I could with my drawings. I began working on illustrations of girls wearing clothes that I wish I had. They were all batik, but they differed from the ones I grew up seeing. As a traditional fabric, batik is often made in more matronly styles, and even when they were designed for younger women, the cuts were still often conservative and fairly dated. I decided to make my own collection, learning how to sew and design patterns for the types of clothing my friends and I would wear, while highlighting the traditional patterns and motifs that made batik so special.
The results are seen here in these photographs, taken by Alejandra Beraco (1-4) and Ninette Saraswati (5-8). The collection dropped and sold out in the summer of 2020, under the name ENDLESS SUMMER / CIREBON SKIES.
Creative Direction, Clothing Design and Styling by Child of Paradise.
Child of Paradise is a character I created to explore the intricacies of my identity and sense of duty to the my heritage and the sacred natural world. Despite her young age she is alert and attune to the need to protect what she loves. Elemental and ancestral symbols create balanced constellations around her figure, always poised with intent and determination.
