Think of this as a very unofficial half-year update.
I’ve been wanting to find a way to communicate with those who support the brand in a way that feels more meaningful than an Instagram post or a story, and also to express my gratitude for supporting this collection the way you have. So I thought this would be the best way to do it. From my personal email, just to let you know where this thing is at.
I’m writing this from Pakistan right now, wrapping up the fall collection and filming the follow-up to the documentary we made last year. I’ve spent around three months on the ground this year working with our production team and artisans. Last year, I spent around six months of the year doing this, so I am currently trying my best to beat that record, for reasons that are probably questionable but hopefully worthwhile.
These trips can be difficult on the mind and body. They can be isolating, and when you’re far away from home for that long, you inevitably start picking apart why you’re doing any of it in the first place. Why persist, why design clothes, why keep chipping away at something that can feel so consuming.
Day to day, it is still mostly just me: writing these emails, designing the clothes, selling the clothes, building the website, doing the shoots, managing production, and trying to build this plane as I fly it.
Over the last year, that has led me to really question and reshape my relationship to designing clothes. I have been thinking more and more about the fact that the world does not need more clothes. It does not need more brands and certainly does not need more noise. So the responsibility, at least for me, is to make things that feel specific, honest, and worth existing.
Design used to feel more personal, almost egotistical, like I was trying to prove something to the kid in me who used to walk around the Lower East Side and Soho dreaming about one day making something of his own.
That part is still there, but now I think more about what the clothes mean once they leave me: how they become part of someone’s life, how they make someone feel, and build some small part of their own personal mythology through them.
Hearing that feedback from people has fundamentally shaped the way I think about this brand, and it has motivated me to keep chipping away at Tone Deaf with as much heart as I can. Now I find myself working on things that I genuinely did not think were possible only a few months ago. I would love to share all of it right now, but I’ve learned that some things are better spoken about once they are real. When the time is right, you’ll know, and I think you’ll understand why I felt compelled to write this email in the first place.
If you have any thoughts, feedback, notes, complaints, kind words, or just want to say hi, please reply to this email. It really is me reading it, and I really do care. I just wanted to let you know where things are at, and that there is a lot more coming.
With love,
Mustafa
Founder / Designer
TONE DEAF STUDIOS
