In 2017, with only four yards of fabric, Lateefat Tobun began to imagine form beyond flat material. There were no mannequins and no digital tools — just cloth, dye, and a question about how a pattern behaves once it wraps a body.
That question has carried her a long way. The garment became a series; the series became a practice spanning murals, painting, illustration and digital couture.
Four yards of fabric taught me everything. Pattern is a language — I just kept learning new ways to speak it.
— Lateefat Tobun
Arts Review has followed that thread from the first experiment to the present, where AI and data tools let the same indigo pattern live as wearable art in a global digital economy.
The insistence that the two belong in the same frame is what gives the work its charge. Heritage is not diluted by technology here; it is amplified by it.
