How Egyptian designer Emily Mikhaiel is reinventing ethical fashion

By the time Emily Mikhaiel launched Nazeerah, her Egyptian-American fashion label rooted in regenerative farming and circular design, she’d already flirted with composting toilets, kelp farms and aquaponics.

“If I’d known how hard it was going to be, no, I wouldn’t have started,” she tells The National, half-laughing, half-serious.

A decade in the making, Nazeerah is not just a brand. It is a manifesto of support for Egyptian cotton farmers and not harming people or the planet. Entirely made from sustainably grown Egyptian cotton at the end of their lifespan, Nazeerah pieces will compost down to nothing, and “return to the soil, where it started,” Mikhaiel explains.

The brand’s origin story is deeply personal. As a child growing up in the US, Mikhaiel made her first trip to her father's homeland Egypt at the age of 10.

“It was a complete culture shock,” she recalls. “It wasn’t like the Aladdin movie,” she adds, smiling. A family sailing trip from Cairo to upper Egypt, however, left an indelible mark, kick-starting a yearning to learn more about her father's roots and upbringing.

She went on to study international relations, environmental policy and law, but it was a course in sustainable business that connected the dots. “I kept asking myself, wouldn’t it be amazing to set a precedent showing things could be done in a better way?”

Her early experiments were eclectic. “I wrote my thesis on composting toilets, but in the US, the red tape was a nightmare,” she says. There were dalliances with kelp farming (“you need a boat, and to scuba dive”); soil regeneration; and carbon sequestration. Then came the breakthrough: a rediscovery of family history.

Her grandfather was a cotton broker, she learnt, while her father, picked cotton after school. Her grandmother, Nazeerah, was the local seamstress, crafting garments for the community from local cotton. “She sewed women and children's clothing made from the cotton that was grown in the surrounding area and produced at the factories,” she explains.

The idea of being the link between different elements was exactly what Mikhaiel was searching for. Bringing together sustainable farming, hand weaving and ethical practices, she named the company Nazeerah in her grandmother’s honour.

Egyptian cotton, famed for its extra-long fibres and exquisite softness, is a byword for luxury. It’s why top-tier hotels wrap guests in the smooth, lightweight sheets. But the cotton economy in Egypt has been under pressure for decades, from both environmental degradation and global competition. Since the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1970s, the Nile no longer floods the fields with nutrient-rich silt. Instead, farmers now have to rely on costly chemical fertilisers and pesticides.

Mikhaiel found a group working to reverse that trend, training farmers in chemical-free techniques, from composting to beneficial insect cultivation. “I got extremely lucky by finding an organisation that's working with farmers here in Egypt and teaching them regenerative farming,” she says.

From there, the vision took shape. She sought out weavers in upper Egypt who still work on handlooms and then faced down the real challenge: producing women’s ready-to-wear that is entirely biodegradable. It meant upending the entire manufacturing process. “I can't design and then select the fabric and the trims. I have to select the fabric, source the trims and then design from there,” she explains.

Cotton thread replaced polyester versions, nylon shoulder pads were swapped for ones made from repurposed baby blankets, while plastic buttons were replaced for locally sourced horn. Even conventional elastic was ditched for a version made with natural latex and organic cotton, while garment bags were reimagined in recyclable paper. The biggest struggle, she realised, was persuading factories to get on board.

“99.99% of all clothing is sewn with polyester thread or a poly cotton combination,” she explains, making factories unsure of how other threads will fare in the machinery. “They're worried that cotton thread will break too easily.”

One factory even reused leftover polyester from another brand by mistake. Today, the only non-compostable element left is the zip tape. “We couldn’t find an alternative,” she admits. “But aside from that, every single part will break down naturally. It has been a huge undertaking to get to this point, but I'm really excited that we're here.”

This journey would not have been possible without enlisting textile veteran Mahmoud El-Gazzar to bring local manufacturing expertise. “He has a lot of experience,” she explains. “He knows all the factories in Egypt and most of the suppliers, so we were able to get going.”

Nazeerah is currently sold online, with a focus on the US market. The typical client? “She’s eco-conscious, she’s busy, and she wants to know the story behind her clothes. Whether it’s for health, sustainability or ethics – she wants to trust what she’s putting on her skin.”

Now, expansion is on the horizon. A new warehouse in Egypt will support shipping across the Gulf and Europe. “There’s demand,” Mikhaiel says. “But so few brands here are doing natural, organic fabrics at this level.”

For Mikhaiel, it’s about more than just clothes. It’s about changing the narrative – of fashion, of sustainability, and of Egypt’s place in the global creative economy.

She’s often the only woman in the room, and, as she puts it candidly, “probably only sitting at the table because I was born in the US.” Yet here she is, crafting a new kind of clothing – one that honours her past, respects the planet and knows exactly what it’s made of.