Known for his bold and eccentric ensembles, this 63-year-old walks us through his career in the arts and reflects on how it inspired him to embrace creativity and fearlessness in his personal style
Hairdresser. Set designer. Visual artist. Creative director.
Raja Malek—who prefers to go by Chelek—is a local legend among those in-the-know, and has worked with such creative powerhouses as Datuk Zahim Albakri, Puan Sri Tiara Jacquelina, and the late Jit Murad. This multi-talented enigma's story begins in the summer of 1983, a few years prior to his return to Malaysia, when Chelek was in his 20s, working as a young hairdresser in London with a fervent love for fashion.
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Standing in a Knightsbridge bookstore, he was enraptured by a hardcover book titled Eiko by Eiko: Eiko Ishioka, Japan’s Ultimate Designer, which details the life’s work of the late Eiko Ishioka, a world-renowned Japanese art director, costume designer and graphic designer.
The next time he stumbles upon that book again, it was 2004 at secondhand bookstore Silverfish in Bangsar, with playwright Jit. Chelek had worked on Jit's plays, Storyteller and Spilt Gravy on Rice, winning an award for set design for the latter.
“Jit and I fought over the book when we found it. In the end, he let me have it, and said that I deserved the book," he shares. "I have her second book, Eiko on Stage, which I found while on a working trip in Tokyo, where I was hired to design a stage in their national theatre. Ishioka was one of the major influences in my career and she shaped the way I worked. From the conceptualisation to the realisation of ideas, it gave me someone and something I could look up to whenever I created.”
As a young boy, Chelek was a wild child who had creativity in spades. He was a precocious boy who would observe his grandmother’s everyday morning ritual of embroidering as she sat by her chettiar table. He would steal his cousin’s Barbie dolls to dress in his own hand-sewn clothes. He was the 15-year-old who picked up a copy of The Hairdresser’s Journal and became a certified hairdresser in London 11 years later.
It only occurred to Chelek working as an art director in Jakarta in the '90s that it was all of these experiences that led him to discover who he really was, and what he was meant to do.
His keen eye for detail hadn’t gone unnoticed, and after a successful first job as an art director designing a gorgeous outdoor bathroom set he described as “Balinese-inspired and covered with a lot of butterflies”, his career trajectory took off. He would fly to Jakarta twice a month, each time for a different production house.
