In a sunny Dubai atelier, books, paintings and fragments of ancient fabrics sit alongside sketches, 3D printed crowns and glittering brooches in watermelon colours.
Welcome to the world of Zaid Farouki, the fashion designer and storyteller whose work resides at the intersection between history, identity and exile.
Farouki founded his eponymous label in 2015 and has become one of the most distinctive voices in the region’s fashion landscape. He's known for dressing the famous and the stylish in impeccably cut suits and sleek dresses lavished in intricate beadwork, infused with oblique references to Arab and Palestinian heritage.
Yet, at times, his craft is overshadowed by his background. “From the beginning, press releases would introduce me as Palestinian-American-Jordanian, or Palestinian-Jordanian before they ever spoke about my work,” Farouki tells The National.
It’s a framing he understands, but resists. For Farouki, his Palestinian heritage is not a label put on him by others, but an aesthetic vocabulary woven into the fabric of every garment he makes. To focus only on his Palestinian side is also limiting, he believes, as all Arab culture is worthy of being referenced.
“My whole brand stems from the idea of our heritage," he says. “If you look at the work, it's all subtle hints to our heritage and who we are as a people.”
Case in point, a drop waist dress that takes its side fastening from a bisht (traditional man's outer robe) or the Noor Al-Tiraz coat, an all white masterpiece of Egyptian Mamluk embroidery.
His familial links to Palestine run deep, however. “On my paternal side, we have an actual documented presence for almost 1,400 years,” he says.
There is even a family joke, he explains, that his mother’s side are the newcomers as they have documents that stretch back “only 700 years”.
Thanks to such documents and photos being preserved after the Nakba of 1948, Farouki discovered this lineage included wealthy landowners who moved in the social circles of royals and politicians in the early 1900s. For a designer, it's a rich seam of inspiration. “What would they have worn at those dinners?” he muses.
Such musings are about far more than just clothes, he adds, and instead about the many influences that shaped Palestinian culture, which in turn influence his own viewpoint today.
Now largely overlooked for the horrors following the 1948 Nakba, the British and Turkish occupations both banned traditional Palestinian clothing, long before the Israeli settlers arrived.
This is fundamental, Farouki believes. “What if that mandate of banning hadn't been there? How would our traditional clothing have advanced?” he asks. “We would be having this conversation of how organically we have been influenced by the world, rather than coming to a complete stop.”
The deliberate and continuous uprooting of Palestinian families since 1948 has curtailed the natural evolution of Palestinian clothes. Forced from the social circles where tatreez embroidery was done, women’s connections to the handicraft have fallen from use. Traditional garments are seldom made now, partly because the places to wear them are denied, or no longer exist.
“This is something I faced about a decade ago, when I started working with deconstructed traditional garments,” he explains. Others expressed shock that he could dismantle a historical Palestinian garment. “They thought the clothes should be preserved. Because they can't evolve, they must be held on such a high level and should not be played with.”
While important to document these clothes before they perish from age (even clothes new at the time of the Nakba would today be 77 years old) it puts people like Farouki in the strange position of not being able to freely experiment with their own culture. “I wanted to question all of that, to just come out with ideas and play around with concepts,” he says.
Palestinian dress must be allowed to continue evolving, he argues. Thanks to its position on the Mediterranean Sea, multiple influences have swept through Palestine, each leaving its mark on the attires of the day.
“You had a very Ottoman presence, which showed who was socioeconomically able to travel to Istanbul, and then the tailoring of the West,” he explains. “Outfits would have been concocted from both, with people donning “Ottoman tarbush (fez) hats and sirwal, (baggy trousers), or a thobe with a tailored jacket on top. There was a mixture.”
The continuing displacement of Palestinians is an important next step in this evolution, he suggests. Farouki’s own family – who hail from the Old City of Jerusalem and Ramle, one of the first places to be cleared by Israel – were forced to flee to Egypt and then Saudi Arabia.
Farouki was raised in Egypt, Saudi and Jordan and then pursued his education in the US, Italy and UK before setting up home in Dubai. Being able to carry his identity wherever he goes is part of being the diaspora, he explains. “Home is wherever your parents happen to be at that moment. Home is those four walls for that short time.”
Instead, his yearnings become his work, such as the Drippings paintings, which later sparked a collection of women’s wear. “I always imagine our homes, when we return, will be candlelit. So, the drippings represent our time away, our prayers and our tears.”
Another collection, Revival, is inspired by a female ruler returning to her rightful home. “A lot of our collections speak about female empowerment, and as a celebration of people with refugee documents, which I don't know if many people are familiar with, of finding their way to actually holding passports, and giving their children identities.”
In a patriarchal society, while the men were working long hours to build a future, “the woman had to hold down the fort,” he explains. Despite the hardships women had to contend with in new countries, “they gave us the privilege of inheriting this beautiful culture,” he adds. “We're raised by strong households of women who raised five, six kids, and they were able to pass down the heritage and the history.”
This strength is quietly referenced in Farouki’s women’s wear collections. “Even when we create suiting or tailoring, it's actually men's pieces that women wear.” This plays into another core question within Farouki’s work: what it means to 'look Arab' today.
Around the world, he explains, many houses have created strong identities around being Italian, French, British or American. “Where is the Arab?” he asks. “I don't want it to be traditional. No, I want it to be at the Cannes Festival and someone walks in and looks super Arab, but so chic, so tailored, in an elevated, modern look made for that event.”
Lebanese designers such as Elie Saab, Georges Hobeika and Rabih Kayrouz paved the way, he says, opening the eyes of the world to the quality coming out of the region. But there is still much more to say, Farouki explains.
His work is built on upscale streetwear, alongside sharp suits and dresses that take hundreds of hours to embellish by hand. “There is no machine work here”, he explains proudly. There are headdresses too (Farouki means crown in Arabic) that have been worn by stars on magazine covers, with one now set to enter a Sharjah Museum collection.
He jokes about the cliches of Arab parents wanting their children to train as doctors and lawyers, and how he could only study art during his degree in business administration and marketing. “You know what it's like,” he laughs. “I chose a different career, but I realised I wanted to heal our trauma. I want to tell our story. There's a story of beauty, of culture, of heritage, of craftsmanship, and I want to be able to showcase it.
“It is my greatest honour to be born into [being Palestinian] and have a purpose in life. But I do wonder, how does it feel some days to wake up without that heavy pit in your stomach? Of feeling that you have to carry your identity and represent it?”
Despite the weight, he wears his Palestinian identity with intense pride, understanding it is greater than an individual and that he must speak for the countless millions who cannot.
“There are people suffering, living under the occupation, and we need to amplify their voices, because it’s not my story," Farouki says. “This is their story.”
