The Story
Local Brown Baby started as a feeling long before it became a brand.
My name is Jiyan, I’m a Kurdish-Mexican artist, storyteller, and mom. I grew up in San Diego, caught between cultures, always code-switching and moving between worlds. Because of my mixed background, I learned that identity isn’t simple, it’s something you build piece by piece.
After college, I worked in the creative industry styling, assisting, doing all kinds of behind-the-scenes work. But I kept noticing how often our stories — brown stories, mixed identity stories, diaspora stories — were either erased or aestheticized. They were stripped of their depth and complexity and then watered down for easy consumption.
I wanted to build something different.
Something that didn’t simplify, but expanded and connected. A space that could hold all of it: politics, heritage, folklore, coming-of-age, motherhood, grief, joy, oral histories, magic, and the messy in-between.
At first, it was just a small photoshoot in my Los Angeles apartment. Then a phrase I couldn’t get out of my head: Support Your Local Brown Baby. I made a t-shirt. Then a few prints. Then I started sharing my work online and something beautiful happened: people all over the world started resonating with it. They saw themselves in it. They reached out and shared their own stories.
What started as one person’s reflection turned into a global conversation, a community of people reclaiming their stories, their creativity, and their voice.
Local Brown Baby is a space for everything I care about: culture, storytelling, resistance, beauty, family, and liberation. It’s where I merge photography, design, and writing into one world that feels like home. Everything I create, from clothes to writing and storytelling, is meant to remind us that we come from people who’ve always created something from nothing. That joy, rage, softness is all sacred and equally necessary when building a better world.