Hushidar Mortezaie

Early life and education Hushidar Mortezaie was born in 1972 in Tehran, Iran. He identifies as queer. In 1990, he met Michael Sears while they were both living in San Francisco. Mortezaie was mentored and worked as a fashion buyer under Patricia Field.

In 1997, Sears and Mortezaie opened an East Village boutique, Sears and Robot. They made clothes that existed as a hybrid of Western and Middle Eastern fashion. The initial clientele was primarily club kids and celebrities, and this evolved into contemporary fashion, couturier, and runways. The shared the fashion label, Michael and Hushi, and this became the rebranded name of the storefront after pressure from Sears Roebuck. They held a fashion show in the 1990s with models walking down the runway holding machine guns, wearing traditional Iranian chadors. Michael and Hushi fashion pieces are sought after and collected, including by vintage dealer Olivia Haroutounian.

Mortezaie's first art exhibition was in 2009 at the Morono Kiang Gallery in Los Angeles. His art work has been part of notable art exhibitions including Theory of Survival: Fabrications (2014), curated by Taraneh Hemami at Southern Exposure; The Third Muslim (2018), curated by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. and Yas Ahmed at SOMArts in San Francisco; Occupy Me: Branding Culture, Identity & The Politics of Fashion (2018) at Helen Lindhurst Fine Arts Gallery in Los Angeles; Mortezaie has worked with artist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto on the design of performance costumes.