Color Coded Crime is your new favorite brand during this New York Fashion Week. It does not chase seasons, algorithms, or rapid relevance. It operates instead as an archive in motion, a living system in which garments function as cultural artefacts, sites of memory, and propositions for the future. Each piece is made to be worn, studied, repaired, and remembered.
At the center of this practice is Mahrang Anwer, Founder and Creative Director of Color Coded Crime, whose work moves deliberately beyond the boundaries of design into cultural authorship. For Anwer, fashion is not a surface expression. It is a language capable of preserving history, resisting erasure, and interrogating how value is constructed in a globalized world.
Her work exists at the intersection of art and design, where garments do more than clothe the body; they speak, archive, and disrupt. Rooted in sustainability, lived experience, and South Asian traditions, Anwer revives Mughal-era craftsmanship while continuously pushing material and conceptual boundaries. Techniques such as Aari / Nakshi, Zardozi, Resham work, and Salma embroidery practices, once widespread across the subcontinent and now preserved by only a small number of master artisans, form the foundation of the label’s work.
Color Coded Crime refuses mechanization entirely. This refusal is not nostalgic, nor aesthetic purism. It is ethical. By rejecting automation, the label safeguards livelihoods and ensures that centuries of embodied knowledge are not abandoned in the pursuit of speed. It asserts that progress does not require replacement, and that the future can still be built by hands that remember.
Every fabric used by the label is locally sourced, grounding the work in the communities and material realities of South Asia. Production is intentionally restrained: limited runs, repair over disposal, waste repurposed into archival samples rather than discarded. These garments are not designed for trend cycles. They are designed to endure to age, to be mended, and to carry forward the histories embedded in their making.
Anwer transforms discarded fabric into functional architectural tiles, blurring the boundaries between fashion, sculpture, and infrastructure. Across media, her practice challenges dominant definitions of waste, permanence, and worth. She asks not what can be produced faster, but what deserves to last and who gets to decide.
Through Color Coded Crime, Anwer builds more than collections. She cultivates an ecosystem: a network of artisans who are not treated as anonymous labor, but as collaborators and stewards of legacy. Fashion, in this context, becomes a collective archive sustained through trust, time, and ethical continuity. Trends are irrelevant. Stories are not.
It is within this ethos of restraint, authorship, and responsibility that Ilias Anwar joins Color Coded Crime as a minority owner, cultural advisor, and U.S. ambassador.
Anwar’s involvement is not framed as a pivot or expansion away from the label’s foundations. It is an extension of them. His career spans culture, technology, and community-building, with a consistent focus on how systems grow without erasing origin. Across platforms and disciplines, his work has centered on visibility paired with integrity, scale paired with accountability.
His connection to Color Coded Crime is also deeply personal. Anwar is Afghan, with Tajik and Pashtun heritage alongside Gujarati ancestry identities shaped by migration, borders, and generational continuity. Before moving into technology and cultural infrastructure, he studied fashion design, grounding his understanding of clothing not as a commodity but as a construction, a matter of proportion, and a source of meaning. Known for his distinct personal style and creative direction, Anwar has long treated fashion as a language, signaling belonging, resistance, and aspiration simultaneously.
“For me, clothing has always carried weight,” Anwar reflects. “It’s about who is allowed to be seen with complexity, and who is reduced to stereotype or silence.”
His decision to join Color Coded Crime is driven by a desire to help spotlight Brown, Asian, and Muslim voices not as trends, but as authors of culture. In an industry that often flattens identity into aesthetic shorthand, the label represents a rare alignment between heritage, ethics, and contemporary expression.
As U.S. ambassador for Color Coded Crime, Anwar will represent the label across the American cultural and fashion landscape. His role includes presenting the brand at fashion weeks and exhibitions, working with artists, cultural institutions, and celebrities, and introducing the garments into spaces where South Asian craft has historically been excluded or misrepresented. His presence is not ornamental; it is strategic and symbolic, ensuring the work is contextualized with depth rather than detached from its origins.
In these spaces, Anwar functions as both translator and protector: articulating the cultural, political, and artisanal significance of the garments while ensuring their meaning is not diluted for accessibility or trend appeal. Visibility, in this context, is treated as a responsibility rather than an end goal.
As a minority owner, Anwar’s stake is not about control, but stewardship. Ownership here signifies accountability to protect the artisans, the archive, and the ethics underpinning the work as visibility increases. His advisory role centers on long-term storytelling, thoughtful partnerships, and structural decisions that allow the label to grow without compromising its core.
Color Coded Crime also resists the borders that divide South Asia. Its work draws from Gujarat, Kashmir, Bengal, Balochistan, Punjab, and the Deccan, treating heritage as a shared and living archive rather than a fragmented one. Embroidery, fabric, and silhouette become connective tissue across geographies and generations, challenging the idea that culture must obey political lines.
This philosophy resonates deeply with Anwar’s own worldview, shaped by diaspora and hybridity, the experience of carrying multiple identities at once. Both Anwer and Anwar believe that preservation is an active practice. Heritage is not static. It must be protected precisely as it evolves.
This collaboration is not about fashion in the narrow sense. It is about responsibility
Together, Mahrang Anwer and Ilias Anwar reinforce a shared commitment: that fashion can be a site of memory without becoming a museum piece, and that sustainability must be structural, not symbolic. That garments can hold beauty and burden simultaneously. That growth does not require forgetting.
Color Coded Crime chooses continuity over cycles, care over scale, and meaning over speed. This partnership does not mark a change in direction; it marks endurance.
A belief that the future of fashion will not be defined by what we automate next, but by what we refuse to abandon.
And in that refusal, there is truth.
