Dubai Fashion Week ends by revisiting Lebanese golden age and with a nod to Ancient Babylon

Dubai Fashion Week has wrapped for another season.

Taking place at Dubai Design District, the biannual event looked forward to spring/summer 2026.

Over the weekend, Les Benjamins and Jasper Conran presented collections, as did British-Iraqi designer Tara Babylon and Lebanese fashion houses Lili Blanc and Emergency Room.

Tara Babylon

Tara Babylon described her Dubai Fashion Week show as “tea party chic”.

As with all of her work – the clue is in her name – the collection once again looked at Ancient Babylon and Iraqi culture, here told via the national flower, a rose.

Repainted in smudged watercolour, it appeared on the opening look of a mini-crini dress and wide-brimmed hat, followed by drop-waist tea-dresses, long over-the-elbow gloves and a draped body-con look with hijab.

A more punchy, flowery pattern appeared on a strapless, 1950s full-skirted look, and fluid trouser suit, overlaid with clear sequins.

The final five looks were 1970s evening-style dresses, entirely decorated in hand-beadwork or sequins. “Everything is hand-dyed,” she explains. “All of these beads come white and clear, so they're all custom dyed to my colour palette.

“Each look took about 40 artisans two weeks to complete. Everything is completely hand-embroidered.”

A labour of love, each look required her “drawing every single motif out onto the patterns”, colouring them and then embroidering on top. “A lot of craftsmanship went into them,” she said.

As well as many different styles of roses, one dress had bold black and white chevrons, which the designer discovered on a recent trip to Iraq. “There were chevrons in the mosques framing the tiling,” she explains. “It felt so abstract and so contemporary.”

Jasper Conran

A throwback to the 1980s, British designer Jasper Conran made his DFW debut. With a tight collection of simple yet elegant midi dresses, Conran worked through the punchy colour palette he is so famous for with beautifully finished tea dresses in jewel-like tones of purple, cerise, cobalt blue and ruby red.

Lili Blanc

Lebanese actress Zeina Maki both opened and closed the Lili Blanc show, which the designer Sabrina Mouhieddine described as being about the “boss within you, and me, and every woman”.

The collection was filled with sharp cut jackets, worn with micro-mini skirts and cigarette pants, that gave way to shimmery silver looks brimming with evening glamour. Mouhieddine said she wanted to tap into how clothes can affect our mood.

“When you wear a blazer, you shift your energy to your boss energy,” she said. “And when you wear a silver, flowy feminine dress, you shift your energy to beautiful and feminine, female energy.”

Emergency Room

The show called Golden (R) Age, was a relook at the “golden age of Lebanon and Beirut”, Emergency Room designer Eric Mathieu Ritter explained.

Using only deadstock and vintage tea towels, blankets, curtains and tablecloths found on the flea markets of Beirut and Tripoli, Ritter aimed to reconnect his audience to bygone days through the visual language of things they would have seen in their grandparents' home.

“The idea was to celebrate this nostalgia and go back to the golden age of Lebanon and Beirut and see what we can find in these forgotten homes, and transform them into new pieces that we could wear to carry on the memory of childhood,” Ritter explained.

The result was zip-up front hoodies made from lace curtains, bra tops fashioned from curtain trimmings and sundresses patchworked from vintage tablecloths and place mats.

He added: “I really wanted to revisit the golden age that we're told about by our grandparents but have never seen, and see how we could eventually find that golden age again through reconnecting with our heritage and reconnecting with what makes us who we are.”

Les Benjamins

“Before I started designing this collection, I discovered the story of proto-Turks migrating from Siberia to Mexico,” explained Turkish designer Bunyamin Aydin. “That's why rock patterns and carpet patterns that you see in Mexico are linked with our region.”

This fact underpinned the whole collection, which deftly mixed Ottoman and Mexican references. Told through characters such as Mexican dancers, Mariachi and Anatolian Mystics, it resulted in a bright shirt and trousers patterned in Turkish carpet motif; a button-front tracksuit stitched with a Day Of The Dead skeleton; and shorts trimmed with cowboy fringing.

Another look had Mariachi-trimmed trousers with fringed chaps, while a woman's look was a cowboy shirt jacket with floor-length, tiered skirt. There was even a Mexican wrestler-inspired look, in black and silver with a matching mask. Beyond the spectacle was a well put-together collection of street style separates, a signature of what this brand does so well.

“Each piece is inspired by a fantasy avatar,” Aydin explained. “One is a rug weaver, one is a dream chaser, one is a lumberjack. I love stories and I feel stories unite us, as global citizens, but also to learn about our roots and the spiritual journeys.

“I want the world to appreciate this region and the beautiful stories and break all the stereotypes that they think of us.”

FAD students

While the other shows were dedicated to marketing skill and expertise, the show from the second year students at FAD Institute of Luxury Fashion and Style had no such commercial constraints and was instead free to explore big ideas, bold fabrications and heady, unfettered creativity.

Presented to highlight the students from the Mumbai branch of the institution, it was full of wonders like a duo of enormous, Demna-at-Balenciaga style jackets that reached from ears to floor; an oversized ruffled purple hooded cropped jacket worn with a snappy mini; pop socks covered in pearls that pinged off with every step; and a fluro-green skirt and ruff that may have been made out of a child's play tunnel. There was a jacket and trousers made from hoops of red and black; a dress with wide shoulders and patterned in fragile lace; and a puffer blanket worn as a shoulder wrap, with an embroidered heart sitting over the model's own.

This is exactly what we want to see from the next generation of fashion designers. Non-conformist, ebullient and free-thinking fun. It was a joy to behold.