#notyourdulhan

SLUMDOG: Interview with Reva Bhatt  

Reva Bhatt aka. Hybrid Hues spills some chai with us and gives us insight on her creative journey and how she wants to change the world one Snapchat story at a time.  

Website: www.hybridhues.com Instagram: @hybridhues

Spilled Chai: Tell us about yourself, your work and how you emerged as a young creative.

Hybrid Hues:  For me fashion has always been this subconscious and conscious way of expressing myself, without having to say anything. In college people would always say “why don’t you start a blog”-and I would always kind of push that aside, or laugh it off cause I never thought I would do it. When you’re putting yourself out there, you literally have to not give a fuck about anything or anyone. So after I graduated, one of my good friends Jasdeep, who's a filmmaker and photographer, convinced me to start Hybrid Hues and has been my partner in crime throughout the process. It started as a portfolio or artistic resume you could say. The first posts I put up on the site were literally me in an outfit that I thought was cool and writing a blog post on whatever I felt was relevant. After my first 2 or 3 posts that got really boring for me, it wasn’t challenging and I felt like I had more to offer. So then that pivoted into more of how I reinterpret fashion to say something about topics I’m passionate about like feminism, or me being a daughter of the diaspora, my hyphenated identity, etc. That’s how it’s become what it is today and now I'm focusing more on styling and art directing projects. Before I would never stylistically mix my South Asian identity with my western clothes-but now after doing so many things with Hybrid Hues, my two identities have become more fluid. It's really helped me grow as a person.

Spilled Chai: What inspires you to create?

Hybrid Hues:  A lot of different things actually.  My own lived experiences, definitely (pause) the people that I surround myself with.  I’ve definitely been making a conscious effort to surround myself with creative, badass, women of color.  My group of friends and their extended friends have also inspired me.  Online creatives, like people that you may not even know, that do such amazing work- they inspire me.  My culture, me being Indian is one of my biggest sources of inspiration.  

Spilled Chai: How do you aim to empower the community with your work?

Hybrid Hues:  I want to work with and give voices to the South Asian community because representation is so crucial. And also educate the community in ways we can be allies to other POC - especially black and Muslim communities because we suck.  And on issues like mental health, sexual liberation, gender norms that we aren't really good at talking about.

My latest 2am idea was this Snapchat channel I just created. So essentially a dope woman of color takes over my Snapchat for 24 hours and basically goes through her daily grind. I think an important thing to realize is that, on Instagram and other social media- you get the best version of people. You get a very curated picture of what people are doing and what their lives entail. So I really wanted to build a space and a community where people can have a sneak peak into the real lives of women of color doing badass things. It allows us to humanize these people that you and I put on a pedestal. Adding that human element to these people can hopefully inspire the younger generation. I tell myself that I am doing this for the 10 year old Reva. I want to build an international community of women of color-for women of color -by women of color.

Spilled Chai: Tell us about your Not Your Dulhan photo series and how the community responded to your work with that..

Hybrid Hues:  Not Your Dulhan stemmed from conversations me and my friends have had on the regular actually.  Conversations (about marriage) that were a joke to us but so real at the same time.  We would feel this underlying pressure and expectation surrounding the topic itself that we felt inspired to make something out of those feelings and conversations.  Artistically it was really important to us to include darker skin representation in our project because I personally feel that that itself is something that is very relevant to the whole topic of marriage.  We extended an open call over Instagram thinking that we would only get two or three people who would be interested.  Little did we know that we would get so many emails from people who were down to work with us, which was so amazing for us to see.  We met all of the girls we picked for our project for the first time- on set, so that was super crazy and exciting all at the same time.  I think the goal of Not Your Dulhan overall was again to just spark a conversation and a dialogue about marriage within our community.  It was really about how diverse we all are as brown women but at the same time we all somehow share this common narrative around marriage from our communities.  After we put it out it was crazy to see how much it resonated with people.  To just see how much people could relate to what we were portraying was amazing.  The whole process was therapeutic for me, because even though you joke about this with your friends, i still think about it in the back of my head “like shit man this is something I have to kind of think about”.  But just seeing such a widespread appreciation for our project was something that allowed me to feel like I’m not the only one feeling these emotions and having these experiences, which was very comforting altogether.

Spilled Chai: Choose one word in your mother tongue that describes you or your work.

Hybrid Hues: Vishvasaneey which means authentic in Hindi (shoutout to my parents and Google Translate for the help!).

Spilled Chai: What advice do you have for anyone who aspires to break into the fashion world.

Hybrid Hues: Just do it! Even if you’re worried about how people will receive your work I feel like you learn so much about yourself during the process of putting yourself out there. Whose following you, how many likes you're getting, what traction each post is getting - it all seems so irrelevant when you’re doing it for yourself. I truly believe that if you have faith in your work and are giving it your everything- people can see that and will recognize authentic work from bullshit. Always try to keep it real with yourself and others. The rest will follow.

NOT YOUR DULHAN

We found a project called 'Not Your Dulhan' that explores how 3 different women challenge the stereotypes and expectations surrounding the “perfect dulhan” (bride) within the South Asian community. And since HYFN is all about dialogue, empowerment and uniqueness, we dig it. Speaking about cultural challenges and sharing varying perspectives leads to conversations that can challenge the norms. Reva Bhatt, one of the creators, gave us a little bit of background on this project.

+Tell us a bit about this project. ”Not Your Dulhan”, a collaborative photo series by Jasdeep, Pragya and I (Reva), explores how 3 different womxn challenge the stereotypes and expectations surrounding the “perfect dulhan” (bride) within the South Asian community. We asked three womxn we’d never met before what their thoughts were on the idea of marriage and ultimately hoped to capture those conversations surrounding colorism, ageism, and sexuality within our series. We learned that despite their unique backgrounds, these womxn share a thread of common experience which they express through small acts of resistance in an effort to redefine the institution of marriage.‪#‎NotYourDulhan‬ is about these womxn transcending beyond the guilt of choosing themselves by reclaiming a level of consciousness.

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