OPEN Friday: May 22, 2026 [15:14-20:17]

Hey, everyone, welcome back to Open. My next guest is a young fashion designer who is born to disrupt and make rooms uncomfortable. Right. Uncomfortable is the theme for today's episode, right? He's not interested in playing it safe or making roomal clothes. His latest collection called Project Zaire exemplifies his raw vision fueled by rebellion, hygienous, and chaos, whether the project mixes fantasy featuring both silhouettes, unusual props, and polka dots, it is a combination of humor mixed with pain, it's serious and unserious at the same time. His goal is to make people question fashion and turn their weirdness into identity in here to share more. We welcome young entrepreneurs, so Harlem Zaire, Benjamin, hello, and welcome. Hey, Rina. Nice to have you. Nice to have me. I appreciate it. I'm excited. I know. Yeah. What was that? Let's get it. Let's do it. Well, first, I want to acknowledge you and congratulate you on your journey thus far. I want to share with our audience a little background on so Harlem, right? Because they speak so highly of you, they love you so much. And I understand that you started with them, and you were 16, and you're 20 now, right? So that's your family at this point in your business family or your development. Yeah. And so I want our audience to have a better understanding of what so Harlem is because I know that you started doing workshops there, and then you went into apprenticeship, and now you're an entrepreneur within the establishment. Yeah. So, so Harlem's the money spot, now let me stop. That's a nice so much. That they're going to love that one. So Harlem is like a creative, incubated space up in Harlem with different seamstress, designers, entrepreneurs, everybody with different businesses, and all in one space, we offer different programs, services, like I'm going to create patterns like we offer workshops. We offer a lot of different things. I feel like so Harlem is just a big family for me, and they definitely helped me alongside of me just emerging. I just designed it, emerging as an individual, like just everything. And I feel like so Harlem is a definitely spot that you've got to check out, because when I started, I'm like, yo, this is the Harlem, I was like, ain't no way, that's crazy. So yeah, like I just love so Harlem. Yeah, it's a huge, it's a very fascinating experience just to walk in. It's in the mink building, and I just love that they're really fostering the upcoming designers, and the way they're doing it is also with the business strategy behind it, and you also have mentors, because you know, a heavier Valencia, we've, I have featured him. We did a fashion show of heavier Valencia. That's my, that's my man. That's my zoo. And so, and so now we're going to talk about you and your style and how you found your, I guess, your niche and what that journey's been like for you. So I say, my style is always experimental, like it's always going to be evolving, it's experimental. I think I definitely started like making clothes playing around with clothes and just pieces during quarantine, definitely, like, just creating like different, different things like dark colors on pants, puzzle pieces on pants, like a lot of weird and like whimsical things, and you know, being around, being around a lot of creative people and a lot of creative influences definitely inspired me a lot to definitely keep going and like, to definitely just actually see that the grass is green on the other side, and I definitely really honed in on making clothes, definitely because, you know, me being a bigger set, obviously, a lot of clothes weren't easily accessible to me for sure, for sure. Right. I see you like polka dots too and you like juxtaposing patterns, you're looking at some images right now. Oh my god. Oh my god. You see clothes that were not accessible to you, but yeah, you seem to be extremely experimental, which we love. Yo, I love, it's chaotic, it's refreshing, it's weird, it's different, it's something that you're not going to see always immediately, and I think I love, especially for this project, I wanted it to be something where it's, it's whimsy, it's comical, it's theatrical, it's refreshing. You know, I feel like fashion, we're in a day and error, where everything tries to be put in a box, we try to categorize things and you know, life just doesn't work like that. Like, I'm sorry, life lead just not work like that. We can't put fashion into a box or what makes us feel comfortable, fashion is supposed