TONE Deaf doesn’t really believe in harmony. The label, founded in 2024, operates in the space where things shouldn’t quite work – where Pakistani century-long craft meets New York’s attention-fuelled streetwear, where hand block printing collides with engineered denim, and where instinct matters more than rules. It’s a brand built less on clean resolutions and more on tension, contradiction, and pushing the process to its limits.
At the centre of it is Mustafa Ahmed, a designer whose work is shaped as much by instinct as it is by heritage. Raised between Pakistan and New York, Ahmed’s practice draws on a duality that runs through the brand itself: traditional craftsmanship reinterpreted through a contemporary, often street-informed lens. The result is a body of work that resists easy categorisation: unisex, process-driven, and grounded in a belief that the most compelling ideas often come from tension rather than harmony.
In this conversation, the New York-based designer reflects on intuition, identity, and why building slowly against the grain of fashion’s usual pace has become the foundation of Tone Deaf’s evolving world.
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Growing up between Pakistan and New York, where did your intrigue in design emerge from?
MA: I was born in Pakistan, and I come from a family of artists. My grandmother, whom I spent a lot of time with growing up, was a full-time painter. My parents travelled a lot, so I lived with her for long stretches. She’d be working on nine or ten paintings simultaneously. You’d walk into her house, and there would be paintings one, two, three, and you’d just choose which one to work on that day.
My cousins and I would stay at her house and paint with her. She taught us how to paint. I was by far the worst at it; my cousins were actually really good – two of them became full-time artists. My aunts are painters, my mom is a fashion designer, my sister studied fine art – it’s kind of in my blood.
My grandmother painted with a knife, not a brush, so everything was super textural. If you touch the paintings, they feel like Braille, like a topographical map. That’s very present in my clothing: the mix of denim, corduroy, silk, all these textures, and also colour. That’s really where my artistic sensibilities come from, and how I think about expression in general.
Before fashion, you were producing music without formal training – what did working intuitively teach you?
MA: I’ve always been an obsessive person; whatever I did, I got really into it. Music was something I was very sensitive to. It just made me feel a lot. Growing up, my older sisters were listening to everything – Kanye, all of them from that era – and I’d listen on the way to school every morning. It was a really powerful experience for me.
When I moved to the US, I had this teacher who built a music lab but didn’t teach anything – he just let you figure it out. I’d spend hours in there every day making music. I didn’t know theory for years. I couldn’t tell you what the notes were.
What that taught me was to trust my instincts. I always think about it this way: if you sit at a keyboard and press a key, people might say it’s random, but I personally believe that there’s no accident in that. There is a deeper subconscious process going on that makes you reach for that note and I always lean into that.
I still work like that. Whether I’m selecting fabrics or looking through a book of colour swatches, the first three I reach for are usually the most important ones. That intuitive process helps me navigate a much more complex design world now.
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Why did you decide to start a brand, and why call it Tone Deaf?
MA: Fashion sits on the precipice of every creative discipline. When I was making music, I was already styling, thinking about visuals, album covers, it all overlaps.
Growing up in New York during that golden era when music and fashion were really merging had a big impact. You started seeing artists step into fashion in a serious way. I was deep into skate culture, Supreme, all of it. I even skipped school to go to the Yeezy Season 3 show at Madison Square Garden when he dropped Life of Pablo. Experiences like that really shape what you think is possible.
The name Tone Deaf comes from combining influences that don’t traditionally fit: my Pakistani upbringing and my New York streetwear background. Those are not in the same tune. Those are theoretically “wrong notes”. But in music, if you’re tone deaf, you don’t distinguish between right and wrong, you just follow instinct. That’s the idea behind the brand.
Tone Deaf: SS26
Tone Deaf: SS26
Denim seems central to the brand. Why start there?
MA: My family has been in denim for four decades, so I grew up in a denim factory. I know it very deeply.
People don’t realise how artisanal denim can be because there’s so much bad denim out there. For us, what makes it distinct is that we operate right at the edge of what’s possible to manufacture. Every single wash has a high chance of failing when we take it to production.
The entire process from the cotton to the fibre to the finished garment is engineered under one roof. There are thousands of steps, and we’re pushing each one in a way that hasn’t really been done before. It’s difficult to replicate, and that’s the point. If you’re going to juxtapose denim with 5000-year-old crafts, you have to push it as far as possible.
Thats what makes Tone Deaf distinct and why people are noticing us. I don’t need to explain to someone why our denim is good, because once you get to touch it and wear it every day, you understand why it’s good. We really consider every single thread and that’s not even an exaggeration.
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Your collections reference techniques like hand-beading and block printing: how do you choose which crafts to explore?
MA: Growing up in Pakistan, these crafts are everywhere, but a lot of people don’t do them properly anymore, using chemical dyes or machines instead of traditional methods.
When I went back in 2023, after not being there for four years – it was like the longest time I’d not been there. I took one of my best friends from uni, an American kid and I saw it through his eyes for the first time. I saw it for the first time as an adult. I felt a responsibility to represent that part of myself properly, and also to shine a light on the craft. I wanted to put it on a pedestal that it deserves to be on.
I travelled with my dad along the Indus River, stopping in villages to find people still practising it the right way. It took three months, but we found artisans whose families have been doing this for 800 years. Literally, generation after generation after generation. When you speak to them, you realise their craft is like a meditation on perfection, it’s almost like prayer. They’re trying to master something over generations because its God’s creation. That really inspired me.
The process itself is slow: these garments can take 30 days, and they’re subject to weather, water, and things out of your control. It teaches you to surrender to the process. Coming from New York, that was a big shift for me. It kind of makes you a different person and almost makes you approach your craft in a very different way. It made me realise that this is important and this work is part of something that’s bigger than myself.
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Q: Has there been a technique you tried that failed?
MA: Right now, it’s everything I’m working on for the next collection. It’s all trial and error, mistake after mistake.
We’re trying to do things like replicate a very specific kind of “dirt” or wear, but in an artisanal way. Explaining that to someone and then actually achieving it is really difficult. But that’s the process we’ll keep going until it works.
It can take 20 days to make one garment, while fashion thrives on speed. Have there been disadvantages to slowing down?
MA: We don’t actually make people wait; we don’t do pre-orders. If you order something, it comes. I don’t really see it as a disadvantage. If anything, it gives the brand a strong foundation. It would be harder to constantly chase trends and risk getting it wrong each season.
For us, there’s an internal rulebook that doesn’t change: push the craft forward, make people feel confident, and deliver on time. If we check those boxes, it’s a successful collection.
There’s also a trust that builds. If someone sees a 30-day hand-block printed jacket, they’re going to trust a simpler piece like a shirt or denim. That attention to craft carries across everything. So it actually becomes a huge advantage.
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Tone Deaf: Behind the Scenes Still
Your pieces are positioned as unisex, does that feel radical or overdue?
MA: It feels natural. The most fashionable people in my life are the women in my family – my mum and my older sisters are some of the best dressed people I know. Most of my sensibilities towards fashion come from how women dress, which then affects how I dress myself. But I design for myself, so it becomes this mix; clothes I would wear, but that women could wear too. It just kind of sits in between without forcing it.
Q: What’s one piece that best represents Tone Deaf right now?
MA: The reverse hand block printed corduroy pants. They’re a baggy silhouette, and we print on one side of the fabric, but through the process, it transfers to the other side in this abstract, geometric way. So what you see on the outside is actually the reverse. It’s a combination of technique and experimentation that really represents what we’re doing.
How would you describe the Tone Deaf world beyond clothes?
MA: It’s very mixed; there’s no one type of person. It’s literally 50/50, male/female, both and neither at the same time. You’ll see a wide range of people wearing it – everybody in downtown Manhattan can wear it, or you have people from Central Cee to Justin Bieber, and even Charlize Theron wearing it too. It’s like the most random assortment of people that you can humanly find wearing it, because it’s really about anyone who cares about well-designed, considered clothing.
Beyond that, it’s people who are on their own path toward mastering something. Whether that’s music, writing, filmmaking, anyone deeply engaged in their craft can connect with it. The idea of Tone Deaf translates beyond clothing, and people interpret it in their own way.
Tone Deaf: SS26
Tone Deaf: SS26
If Tone Deaf is a “practice of listening differently,” what do you hope people hear?
MA: A lot of brands try to bring people into a single identity, like “this is our community.” I don’t see it that way. I think everyone has a really unique set of inputs, especially in cities like London, New York, and Paris. But there’s a tendency to homogenise into this one collective identity. I want people to know when they’re engaging with Tone Deaf is to assess yourself. What are your contradictions, their background, what shaped them, and follow what feels intuitive. The way I process my Pakistani and American identity can apply to anyone with dualities in their life. That’s what being part of Tone Deaf is: being aware of that and leaning into it.
What makes you confident?
MA: Having something to work towards. Waking up with something I’m building, something I care about, something I can come into the office and be excited about. That’s what gives me confidence, just being in motion, working toward something meaningful.
by Imogen Clark