I remember the first time I saw Jen’s work, in an exhibition at Antwerp’s MoMu. It really tickled me pink: there was something so clever and wry about it—not in a loud, slogan-on-a-T-shirt way, but in the way it seemed to sit somewhere between fashion and real life, with women’s bodies as its starting point rather than something to be corrected or resolved. I knew then and there that Jen was my girl.

At the time, I couldn’t quite articulate why it felt so refreshing—but coming off the back of three months of fashion weeks, it’s now impossible to ignore. The spectacle of dress is increasingly feeling detached: beautiful clothes, often made under inhuman pressure, shown on bodies that are steadily being whittled down by trends like Ozempic and an ever-narrowing idea of perfection. Against this circus, Jenny Fax offers something else—something closer to life.

This is why I always find her presentations during Paris Fashion Week a breath of fresh air—god forbid we laugh during FW! They are colourful living tableaux: women as they are—slightly exaggerated, sometimes humorous, never, ever reduced or restrained. Outside, the scene is just as telling—queues around the corner, die-hard fans dressed head-to-toe in Jenny Fax, waiting to enter her world. It’s the kind of following that can’t be manufactured, especially not for an independent brand.

What emerges from our conversation below is a designer who didn’t arrive through fashion’s usual systems, but from somewhere more intuitive and observant. Raised far from any fashion capital, Jen built her practice through looking—at people, at memory, at the small details of daily life. In doing so, she has created an iconic aesthetic—and a community that extends far beyond the act of buying clothes.

There is a lot to be learned from Jen’s wisdom and talent. For Jenny Fax isn’t about speed or visibility; it’s about building slowly: through connection, participation, and a way of seeing that remains in touch with the world it draws from.

Starting from a Distance

I started Jenny Fax in 2012. It’s been a long journey, but in the end it always comes back to something very simple: you just have to do what you want to do.

I grew up in Taiwan in a big family. We were four children, and I was the second. My mum had to be very careful with money, so we couldn’t always have clothes or things like that. I think that’s where it started—I really wanted to dress up, to change things, but I couldn’t.

At that time, there was no internet, and Taiwan wasn’t a fashion capital. We didn’t really know anything about fashion. I remember thinking there was only one Fashion Week. Everything felt very far away. But I think that distance made me more curious. When you don’t have access, you imagine more.

When I was 19, I went to Paris, then Antwerp and Brussels. I didn’t really finish school. For a long time, I would take the train there, but I wouldn’t go in—I would just look at the school and go back. It sounds strange, but I think I was learning in a different way.

For me, education depends on the person. School gives you rules and limits—and that can be good. But taking a longer way, living, travelling, seeing things—that also shapes you.

I don’t think there is one correct path.

Memory, Girlhood, and What’s Already There

My work always comes from what I already have. I don’t have a big concept or philosophy each season. I work with memory—childhood, small feelings, things I’ve seen.

Memory is very personal, but when you show it, it can connect to something deeper in other people. That’s why the work can feel both playful and serious at the same time. It can look cute, but there is always something else underneath.

I’m very interested in ordinary women. When I design, I think about people I see in daily life—on the street, in cafés. Those women are more like my muse than an imagined character. I think that is important. Because most people are like this. They are not perfect, and they are not trying to be.

I don’t want to design something that corrects the body. I don’t make corsets. I don’t try to make the body more “perfect.” I think the woman should be as she is. So I look for what goes against the normal rules, and I put that into the clothes. Sometimes it’s something people don’t want to show. Maybe it’s not what people expect to see, but it’s real life.

That’s part of the process—working with what is already there, not trying to change it.

A Little Bit Outside

I moved from Taiwan to Paris, then Belgium, and later to Japan. Each place changed how I see things.

In Europe, people can see you are foreign. In Japan, people think you understand everything, because you look similar, even when you don’t. That was difficult at first.

But I think moving between places gives you a certain position. You are always a little bit outside, even when you are inside.

Maybe that’s where the humour comes from.

It comes from my family, but also from Taiwan. It’s a place with mixed influences, so there is a kind of humour that can be a bit dark, a bit negative, but still funny. You can see something serious, but also something slightly off at the same time.

Growing up in a big family, you also learn to be funny. You want to make people laugh. There are many children, so you feel like you need to do something to be seen.

I think this way of seeing also affects how I design.

In Europe, I think more about shape—something simple, strong, direct. In Japan, it’s more about detail, more layers, more accumulation.

The thinking is the same, but the expression changes. I need both. If I only do one, I get bored.

“One Foot in the Grave”

At the beginning, I thought a lot about press—wanting more visibility, more media. I think everyone goes through that. You think that’s what you need. But over time, I realised something else is more important: community.

You need people who really connect with what you do. Not just see it, but feel it, share it, carry it forward. That takes time. But it stays longer than attention.

Sometimes the industry now feels confusing. There are many young creatives who are more like influencers, but they are also making clothes. It’s difficult to understand what that means.

Recently, I opened a small space in Tokyo. I called it One Foot in the Grave as a joke to myself—maybe it was a bit too late to open a store. But it’s not really a shop. It’s more like a space—a physical version of my world. Like Instagram in three dimensions. It’s in a building I always wanted to be in—known more for subculture, animation, secondhand shops. Not really fashion. I think my brand is closer to that than to high fashion spaces like Omotesando.

I’ve also been doing workshops for several years. I like being close to people in a small setting. Sometimes people come and don’t talk for four hours—they just focus on making something. Some of them never come to a show or a presentation. They don’t follow fashion in that way. But they come to the workshop. Some buy clothes, some don’t.

I even have people who work in host clubs come. That surprised me. But maybe they need a different kind of space—to do something with their hands, to be somewhere soft for a while.

It made me realise there are many ways people connect to a brand.It’s not only about buying something. It’s about entering a world.

Fashion is difficult now. There is a lot of pressure. But as an independent designer, I think my responsibility is more simple: I listen to my community; I make what I believe in.

When things get hard, I remind myself: imagine you’re doing a completely different, everyday job. Then I go back to work.

Pass it on—what inspires Jen:

Many people might think I only like cute things. But actually, I rarely focus on using cute elements to make something cute.

In my opinion, things that make you feel pity, or even things that seem annoying or unpleasant, can sometimes create a feeling that connects to cuteness.

I have always wanted to see Jordan Wolfson’s artwork in real life. I really love his art.

I’m also a big fan of The Office. The show inspires me in many ways, especially in terms of creativity and freedom of ideas. I also enjoy watching Love Is Blind—I often use it as a way to study characters.

In film, I really admire Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang. Their generation worked with very limited resources, but they still managed to break through and create something new and free. I find that very inspiring.

My family has also influenced me a lot. Like I mentioned in my presentation, family is something you cannot choose. You are born into it, with both good and bad. You don’t get to choose the people in this community—you learn how to adapt and find your place.

Because of these differences, I’ve become more resilient. At the same time, it has also given me a sense of freedom in another way.

All of these things continue to inspire me in my life.

Thank you, dear Jen, for reminding us that fashion doesn’t have to be learned through fashion—and that staying close to life, in all its strangeness and softness, is its own form of power.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

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https://renaissancerenaissance.com/

I’m sorry for the delay in writing this—I had my first fashion season back since surgery and then headed off to Tanzania to tend to another part of me (my barefoot, slightly feral nature-girl side). A lot of my work this year has been about nurturing the moving parts within me—and how that translates into my personal and professional lives. I fear that as a society we’ve become a little too obsessed with tidy categories, black-and-white binaries, when life really happens in the grey areas. That’s where all the human sits.

It feels almost serendipitous that this conversation with Cynthia Merhej, who is based in Beirut, circles exactly that. Her brand, Renaissance Renaissance, is named to embrace our ever-changing natures—the flux, the indefinable.

You may have heard of Cynthia when Rama Duwaji wore a coat designed by her to Mamdani’s inauguration, or through her work on the costumes for Durga Chew-Bose’s adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse. But I love Cynthia’s work because it allows me to play with all sides of myself, and still feel good about myself while I’m at it. I’ve never felt entirely feminine—nor entirely masculine, for that matter—it truly shifts day to day. From collection to collection, her designs recognise exactly that flux, translating the friction that makes us human into fabric and cut. It’s a much-needed counterpoint within an industry that still loves to pin narrow visions of womanhood onto bodies.

What follows is as much about self-governance as it is about clothing. It begins, as it should, with the body.

Can I Sleep at Night?

For me, it always comes back to this question: can I sleep at night? That’s really what it is.

Because I’ve realised that when I’m not being truthful to myself, my body reacts. When something isn’t right, I start getting sick, my immunity drops. And I’m like, okay, why am I getting sick three times in a month? Something is really stressing me out; something isn’t sitting right.

What I’ve learned is that when you make the right decision—even if it goes against society, or expectations—you physically feel better. And anyway, it’s all going to catch up with you eventually. You have to really be listening to your body constantly. It’s like an instrument, you know, make sure it’s always tuned.

Everyone’s like, ‘you can’t skip a season.’ And for a long time, I really believed that. I didn’t skip a season through a total banking collapse in Lebanon, violent protests, the collapse of the government, Covid, the port explosion, moving countries. I still didn’t stop. Because I thought, if I skip a season, it’s over—I don’t have a career anymore.

Now I feel like I’ve earned the right to pause. I have other priorities. Number one: mental health. Number two: am I doing something that actually feels truthful? Or am I just doing it because that’s what everyone else is doing?

It’s hard, because people might forget about you—and they might. But you have to trust that it’s for the best. I’m like, whatever comes next will be for the best, because I’m listening to myself. I’m listening to my body. I’m listening to my heart.

A Stage, Not Centre

What I do think is quite nice about Beirut is that I can look over everything more clearly. I’m not just doing a sketch and sending it to a factory God knows where, producing it for me, and sending it back. It’s very hands-on, which I really like. In terms of the human element especially—you’re constantly interacting with people, and you can see the direct impact of what you’re doing, which is really fulfilling.

You have to understand, I come from two generations of woman-led couture ateliers. It started with my great-grandmother in Palestine. When she had to leave, they thought they were coming back, so she didn’t take any of her work. They lost everything. We only have two photographs and that’s it.

My mum continued that in Beirut. She built her own atelier and managed around twenty employees. I grew up in that environment. And because I was always very interested in storytelling and narratives, I think my brain just linked those two things together. Even if she never formally taught me garment design, it’s like I absorbed it anyway. It was just in the air.

Sometimes being in the West is difficult, because you’re literally seeing your country being bombed by countries where people are paying taxes. There’s a very strange disconnect there. So mentally, it can feel better to be here, because I’m not having to deal with that contradiction all the time. When I’m here, I’m just doing what I’m doing. I’m not looking at what anyone else is doing.

Paris is a stage, and it’s a great one. It’s centralized, it gives visibility, and it allows people to discover designers they might never encounter otherwise. But that doesn’t mean you have to be based there full-time.

A lot of young designers feel this pressure that if you don’t do a show in Paris, you’re no one. And that’s just not true. There are very successful brands in Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, Dubai, Saudi Arabia. Maybe no one’s heard of them in the West, but they’re making money, they’re commercially viable.

The problem is that the establishment still follows the same playbook. They look at hype instead of substance, and then they wonder why fashion is imploding and not making any money.

I’m not against Paris at all. I love living there. After 2020, everyone scattered across the world. Now it feels like that’s starting to change—but Paris still offers that sense of community, of not feeling so alone.

But everything is in flux. We talk about decentralization, but what does that actually look like? What does progress even mean anymore?

We were sold globalization as progress for years, and now we can see it’s not working in many ways. So what’s the other proposition? I think that’s what’s being explored right now—mostly by smaller brands.

An Amalgam in Flux

At the end of the day, I am Lebanese. I’m Palestinian. I’m not ashamed of that at all. It shaped a lot of my identity and worldview.

When I was at Central Saint Martins, I had to deal with people telling me, “Oh, you’re Lebanese—do a project about Lebanon.” I would try to do something about Lebanon, but my tutors—who were white men—wouldn’t understand anything. They didn’t understand the context at all. It was incredibly frustrating.

I get asked a lot how Lebanon inspires my work. That’s difficult to answer, because I’m not taking anything literal and putting it into the clothes. Being from Lebanon is interesting because our identity is so fragmented. We’ve had a civil war for so long. So many civilisations have passed through—the Romans, the Umayyads, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, the French. As a Lebanese person, you kind of become that yourself. We’re always absorbing different ideas and cultures. So it can’t really be put in a box. And I don’t want to be put in a box.

People are often shocked when they find out I’m from Lebanon. But if you met me in person, you probably wouldn’t know where I’m from. I’m an amalgam of all those experiences, and I think that shows in my work.

I think the drift toward certain fabrics happened in a similar way. I used to be more into stiff, technical fabrics—more architectural. Over time I started moving toward more fluid fabrics, and that shift happened alongside my own personal shift.

As I started accepting my sexuality and my body more, it didn’t have to be so stiff and structured anymore. It became more about the body—more seductive.

That evolution is really why I named the brand the way I did. It’s about the idea that we should be able to evolve—to shift, to change—and not be one thing.

I don’t think about femininity and masculinity in a fixed way. I feel very girly, and I feel very masculine. I like subverting those codes—mixing something delicate with tailoring. Dressing like a “woman” feels exhausting to me. It feels unattainable.

The way I work is very intuitive. I try not to overthink, because when I do, the work feels overworked and unreal. Fashion often wants to create a perfect package—someone to aspire to—but that perfection isn’t real.

My identity isn’t built from one facet; even if that means the work isn’t easy to package, that’s fine—it acts as a filter. Anyone who wants something easy doesn’t belong here. Anyone who wants something that makes their brain work a little, or makes them feel something—those are the people I want to attract.

In Character

I love cinema, and my dream someday is to direct something, so it was really nice to be part of the world of Bonjour Tristesse. What I loved was looking at clothes from the point of view of a character. When I design, I’m always thinking about a character, but it has to stay vague. You have to think commercially, so you can’t be too specific.

Working with Miyako was great because she would ask very concrete questions. Like, she’s going to the beach—she can only pack three things in her suitcase. What would those three things be? You’re not thinking about making a certain number of tops or skirts, or selling to lots of different women. It’s just one person, and you can really focus on her.

You’re stepping into her life—but through clothes. And when you have your own label, so much of you is invested in it, so it’s actually really nice to invest that care into a character.

Cynthia’s words to live by: “Everything is temporary”

Pass it on—3 creatives Cynthia thinks are worth our attention

Creative Space Beirut @creativespacebeirut

Ahmed Amer, @ahmedamerofficial

Dalila Barakache, @dalilabarkache

Shaha Raphael, @shaharaphael

Thank you, dear Cynthia, for reminding us that alignment is the only real strategy—and that refusing the centre, the box, and the season can be its own form of power.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

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https://www.faconjacmin.com/

As I write this, I’m snuggled in a Façon Jacmin jumper. In fact, I probably bundle up in Alexandra and Ségolène Jacmin’s clothes every other day. For their designs tick every box I look for in ready-to-wear (and I’m probably the pickiest customer out there): careful in their creativity, comfortable in their complexity. Considered and inquisitive and sharp. I feel like myself when I wear their clothes.

Perhaps what it comes down to is that the Antwerp-based design duo know how to listen: to the human who will wear their designs, to the textile in their hands, to the environment; to every single person and element involved in the design chain, they afford attention, restraint, and reciprocity. They are, sadly, qualities missing not just from the fashion industry, but from our world at large. Their clothes carry that knowledge—of how attention becomes form.

One of the reasons I moved from the art world into fashion was because I fell in love with fashion’s intersection of creativity and business acuity. As consumers, it’s easy to forget that young designers are also entrepreneurs—and that there are many, many (hopefully human) hands involved in the making of our clothes.

This conversation is special because it offers a rare, honest insight into entrepreneurship, and into the uneasy costs behind buzzwords like “upcycling.” None of us are immune to the questions raised here—about our appetite for chronic newness, our expectation of low prices, and the growing greenwashing of the second-hand market. I hope it encourages you to think more carefully about your purchasing power, and the implications it carries—for young designers, and for our planet.

Timelessness as a Creative Language

Ségolène: I didn’t have a ‘creative’ educational background. I studied engineering, then worked for two years in consulting. I realised I was very unhappy during those two years. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, to take risks—and I was lacking creativity. That was strange for me, because I had always been very mathematical…

Then I thought: actually, I have a twin who is very creative and who is already in the industry! And it would be great to do something together. Doing an entrepreneurial project alone is very hard. I really believe it’s better to have synergies, energy that comes from working with someone else.

So, I asked Alex if she would be open to discussing doing something together, in fashion.

Alex: I always felt like I could express myself best through fashion. I studied at La Cambre, where we were pushed to think in a very free, creative way. That’s where I really discovered myself, and realised how much I could express through clothing.

After school, I worked at Maison Margiela, then at Jean Paul Gaultier, working on pre-collections for women and men. Later, I worked at Dries Van Noten as a seller in Paris.

Seeing the clothes from the other side—fabric, colour, how people actually wear things—was very important for me. And it was around that time that I realised I wanted to create something of my own.

S: Alex came up with the idea of using denim to begin with, to imagine it in styles that could be sophisticated. But it needed to be clothes that we could wear all the time.

A: Denim is like a second skin. It evolves with you and lasts a very long time. It also has a very strong history. So many different types of people have worn denim, across generations, across social backgrounds. It’s fierce, but it’s also intimate.

S: There’s also this transgenerational aspect. You can pass down your denim to your kids.

And people say, no, it’s not sustainable, because denim uses a lot of water, etcetera. And yes, that’s true. But it’s also timeless: it’s a fabric that resists time. You can wear it, wash it, live in it for generations. And even when it’s damaged, it’s still beautiful. Sometimes it’s even better. There’s something very honest about that.

The Cost of Always Being New

S: At the beginning we started with the timeless denim styles, but we quickly realised that you do need to surprise people and to create desirability. If we do only denim, it can be a bit heavy, and we want to have balance, a sense of relief on the racks.

Time is probably the hardest thing—there is never enough of it. You are always creating, always preparing the next collection, always thinking about what comes next. There was a moment when everyone was talking about slowing down, about carryovers, about not following seasons anymore. We tried that. But even when you believe in timelessness, people would come in at the end of January and say: where is the new collection? They want to dream. They want to be surprised.

A: For me, what is difficult is that there is not enough time to really create.

The rhythm is very fast. Sometimes you have to design quickly, without having time to do proper research, to look, to absorb. You are already thinking about the next season while you are still finishing the current one. That can be frustrating, because creativity really needs time.

S: When we started doing B2B, the pressure became even stronger. Buyers are under a lot of stress themselves. Everyone is anxious. And sometimes that pressure comes back to us very directly.

And there is also everything behind a garment that people don’t always see. Sometimes customers forget what it actually takes to make something. They see the result, but not all the work before—the fittings, the sourcing, the production, the delays.

When you are asked to do more, and faster, and cheaper, all at the same time, that pressure becomes very real. And it doesn’t stay with one person; it goes through the whole team.

A: It can be hard emotionally, because you put a lot into a collection. And sometimes a piece doesn’t work—not because it’s wrong, but perhaps because there wasn’t enough time to tell its story properly. Other times, a piece becomes successful a season later. And then you realise how arbitrary it can be. That’s difficult to accept.

S: You can feel like you’re always running forward. And sometimes you need to stop, to step back, to think: how do we continue without losing ourselves?

Upcycling, Integrity, and Refusing Shortcuts

S: Upcycling was there for us from the beginning. It wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t something we added later. If you care about time, if you care about how things last, then you naturally start thinking about what already exists.

At the beginning, every time we put an upcycled piece in the window of our store, people loved that it was unique. They loved that no one else could have it. Is that still the case? Maybe. But maybe upcycling has also become a trend for some people—and trends come and go.

Upcycling is expensive. It’s not easy to scale. And it doesn’t fit well into B2B systems, which often want reproducibility. Sometimes you feel the pressure to stop, to simplify, to do things the “normal” way.

But if we did that, fashion wouldn’t make sense for us anymore. We wouldn’t be happy. So we continue. We adapt, of course. We listen to feedback. But we don’t want to lose what feels essential to us.

A: It’s also a challenge we enjoy. It forces us to slow down, to think, to design in a different way. You don’t start from a blank roll of fabric. You start with something that already has a life, a shape, constraints, and it pushes you to rethink archetypes, proportions, construction. Designing with limits can be very creative.

S: There’s also something else people don’t really talk about. When we started working with second-hand centres to source materials, one of the owners really took the time to explain to me the not-so-sustainable side of all this. Because when you look at where second-hand clothes actually come from, it’s often not local at all. It can be a whole worldwide chain. Sometimes the clothes travel across countries, across continents. And then with companies like Shein breaking everything, it becomes even more extreme. The shipping, the geographies—it’s crazy.

I don’t think this is something most people know. We imagine second-hand clothes coming from houses next door, from Belgium, from nearby. But often, that’s not the case at all. Sometimes it’s completely unsustainable.

The Body, Comfort, and Designing for Real Life

A: The body is always very important for me. Especially women’s bodies. Clothes have to be lived in. They have to move. They have to feel good against the skin.

I don’t like the idea of forcing a body into clothes. Even strong pieces should feel comfortable. You should feel confident, not restricted.

S: That care really comes through when you see people wearing the clothes. And having our own store helps a lot. Alex’s studio is just above and she can see the different bodies, different ages, different ways of moving. A body at twenty-five is not the same as a body at forty. And that matters.

A: Feedback is important. Of course you can’t take everything. But listening is part of designing. Over time, you learn how to keep your voice while still adapting. It’s a balance.

S: When things get difficult—when the pressure is high, when everyone is tired—what keeps us going is seeing the clothes worn. Seeing someone really take ownership of a piece. Receiving a message saying they’ve never wanted something so much.

That’s when you remember why you do this.

A: In the end, it always comes back to the body—feeling good, feeling comfortable. That’s really what matters.

Facçon Jacmin’s words to live by: Entrepreneurship is constant motion — you need to dare, adapt fast, and keep moving forward to keep surprising people.

Pass it on—3 creatives Façon Jacmin think are worth our attention:

Ron Nagle: American sculptor, @ronnagle

D’heygere: Belgian-born, Paris-based accessories designer, (who I’ve also written about here), @d_heygere

Paolo Carzana: Welsh designer working with natural, plant-based materials @paolocarzana

Thank you, dear Alex and Ségolène, for your lucidity, your care, and for holding space for a way of making that resists speed, shortcuts, and easy answers.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

Subscribe now

This period has been a funny little experiment for me in how dress affects our nervous systems and emotional states. Under the guidance of both my acupuncturist, Elaine Huntzinger, and my OBGYN, I’ve vowed never to be cold in 2026 and to do away with any tight-fitting clothing. According to TCM, for women with womb-related issues, it’s crucial to ensure warmth of the feet, neck, and lower back. And too-tight trousers can be interpreted by the nervous system as a threat, triggering further inflammation. Loose-cut, warm, softly fibre-d clothing allows my body to feel safe, exhale, and concentrate on its only job right now: healing. Give it a go if you suffer from any kind of pelvic pain, even during periods!

Ziyad Buainain @ziyadbuainain

https://www.ziyadbuainain.com/

It’s a happy auspice for me to begin this new year with Ziyad Buainain. I’ve had an internet crush on his label for some time now, and used this platform as an opportunity to learn more. And not only did I fall further in love with his impassioned, intelligent designs, but I found a friend in his cadent pursuit of honesty within both himself and fashion.

If design, at its etymological root, means to mark something out with intention, then Ziyad is its guardian. A specialist in eveningwear, his gowns tackle sustainability 360°, never shying away from the awkward interface with commerciality in which so many labels struggle. For his clothes can be manipulated—effortlessly, elegantly—in such a way that you can make several looks from a single garment. Each with only slight echoes of the others; all encouraging imagination.

In between this interview and its publication, Ziyad won Fashion Trust Arabia’s Eveningwear Prize and was featured in the Dazed MENA 100 list. It’s safe to say that you’re in for a treat.

Colour, Memory, Emotional Truth

I was born in Saudi Arabia, and my parents are both Saudi, but when I was about five, we moved to Tokyo. My brother and I started school there: two little Saudi boys in an all-boys Catholic school in Tokyo. It doesn’t really get more random than that.

I think that was where I started to develop my appreciation for art, and for things that are a bit more obscure, a bit more surreal. Growing up there, you were surrounded by these kooky, quirky TV shows—everything was so colourful, a bit crazy, just very different. And I think that opened something up for me.

My mum was also a huge influence. Before Tokyo, and then again when we moved back to Saudi Arabia, she owned a multi-brand boutique in Al Khobar, in the Eastern Province. It’s not one of the main cities people usually talk about—it’s closer to Bahrain, Kuwait, the Emirates—but she was bringing in very daring things at a time when things were much more conservative.

She loved very unconventional pieces. Galliano, Moschino, short dresses, things that were quite sexy. She dressed like that herself too—she was quite rebellious in how she dressed, especially for that context. And it was really inspiring to grow up around that. She used to take me on buying trips with her, to showrooms and stock houses, and I remember sitting in her shop, going through garments, looking at how they were made, touching the fabrics. That was when I thought: this is it.

I even had a little sewing machine as a kid. I tried to make things. Everything was wrong—the seams were bad, nothing fit—but I was trying anyway.

If I’d always wanted to do fashion, it wasn’t easy to talk about. It just wasn’t really a thing for men where I grew up. So I didn’t push it: I studied visual communication, then business, and I worked for a corporate company for a couple of years doing executive office management—choosing interiors and artwork for executive buildings. It was the most creative role you could have in that environment, but I was bored. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted.

Eventually, I just put my foot down. I enrolled myself at Marangoni in Milan, did an intensive fashion design programme, then a Master’s in womenswear. After that I moved to London, worked briefly, and then Covid hit. I was alone in London, designing in isolation—and that’s when I started working on my own collection.

Sobriety, Survival, and Self-Authorship

Fashion became an outlet for my stories. Especially my first collection, which was deeply tied to my sobriety. I stopped drinking in 2019, and I wanted to tell that story through clothes. I merged it with visual references that had always stayed with me—like House, the 1977 Japanese surrealist horror film by Nobuhiko Obayashi. It’s surreal, absurd, visually intense. I used those visuals to express what addiction felt like: being trapped, disoriented, on fire. And then the later part of the collection moves toward hope—toward realising you need help, and that it’s possible to get out.

One of the prints came from a really specific moment: I went to a wedding in Rome shortly after getting sober. I almost didn’t go—I knew how those environments used to be for me. But I went, didn’t drink, felt safe, and on the flight home I took a photo of the sunset from the plane window. I remember feeling so proud of myself. Later, when I was working on the collection, I found that image on my phone and knew it had to be part of the story. I motion-blurred it, stacked the colours, and printed it onto a dress shaped like sun rays. It became a symbol of survival.

There’s also a skirt covered in reaching hands—that was about asking for help, about that moment where you realise you can’t do it alone. A burning chandelier print—taken from House—represented addiction as being stuck inside a house on fire, where everything you touch still burns you. Addiction doesn’t always look how people imagine it. You can have a beautiful life on the outside and still be on fire inside.

Sobriety changed everything for me. I honestly believe that starting my own brand saved my life. I knew I couldn’t build anything meaningful while drinking. It kept me stagnant, foggy, disconnected from myself. Being sober forced me into situations without a crutch, and over time that gave me confidence. Real confidence. It also clarified relationships. You start to see which connections are real, and which only existed for a good time. It’s painful, but it brings quality into your life.

Transformative Design & Responsible Creation

Colour has always been really important to me. I associate colours with feelings very instinctively. I didn’t formally study painting, but I was always in the art room at school. During lunch, after school—I was always there making things. My art teacher even created an award just to give to me. She let me paint the door of her classroom. That freedom meant a lot.

Even as a kid, it was there. In Boy Scouts in Japan, we had to carve little toy cars for a race. Everyone made practical cars. I decorated mine. I won an award for the most interesting design. Looking back, it’s funny—but it makes sense.

I chose womenswear because I wanted to explore elegance without aggression. I like that balance—things that take up space, but softly. And I also wanted to show a different side of Middle Eastern design. There’s this very dated, Orientalist idea of what Arab designers are supposed to make. Embroidery, tradition, modesty. It’s beautiful, but it’s not the whole story. I’ve spent my life being told I’m not enough of something—not Saudi enough, not Western enough, not English enough. At some point you stop trying to win. You just decide to be your own thing.

Sustainability is personal for me. I grew up in a household where nothing was wasted. When I started the brand, I committed to made-to-order pieces, using deadstock and recycled fabrics, and reusing leftovers as linings. Seeing how much fabric luxury houses waste is honestly shocking. I just don’t want to contribute to environmental destruction if I can avoid it.

But sustainability is also about behaviour. I was tired of hearing people say they couldn’t wear something again because it had been photographed. So, I design pieces that transform: dresses that unzip into tops, skirts that change shape, garments with multiple lives. One piece can be worn five different ways. I love seeing how people interpret them, often in ways I never expected.

Personal style matters to me. I’m bored of trends. Before social media, style felt like a surprise. Now everything feels copied, literal. Clothes should unlock something in you. They should bring out a part of your personality you haven’t visited in a while. When someone wears my clothes, I want them to feel special. Inspired. Like they’ve unlocked something in themselves.

Ziyad’s words to live by: I always tell young creatives to hold tightly to their own voice. In this industry it is very easy to be pulled in different directions, or to feel pressured to fit into someone else’s idea of what you should be. Your individuality is the one thing that cannot be replicated, so protect it and let it guide you.

Another principle I live by is to never let the industry harden you. Fashion can be challenging, competitive, and sometimes unforgiving, but it can also be incredibly beautiful when you approach it with openness and curiosity. Stay kind, stay receptive, and keep your heart connected to why you started. Bitterness only dims your creativity, while integrity keeps it alive.

Surround yourself with people who give you energy and inspire you. The right people will sharpen your perspective, nurture your confidence, and remind you of your worth on the days you forget it.

And finally, trust your journey. There will be moments of doubt and moments of clarity, and both are necessary. If you stay true to your identity, honour your craft, and keep your spirit open, you will find that your path unfolds exactly as it should.

Pass it on—3 creatives Ziyad thinks are worth our attention:

Alaa Alaradi: The FTA Franca Sozzani Debut Talent winner 2025. Alaa is insanely talented, intelligent and kind, @alaaalaradii

Mona Haider: One of the founders of HUE - an inclusive skincare brand. She's a hard worker with a gorgeous vision and a beautiful mind, @plusmona @madeforhue

Polina Osipova: A multidisciplinary artist. Her work is stunning, inspiring and thoughtful. She's also an angel. @polinatammi

Thank you, Ziyad, for allowing us to walk down memory lane with you. May your words be a reminder of what intelligent design looks like—and the pause and self-inquiry required to get there.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

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I’d always intended to close each month of Moral Threads with an essay—an attempt to metabolise all the stories shared. What began as a way to explore fashion as care has become, unintentionally, a structure of self-care. The red thread between these designers is the way they touch life’s pain with both hands and knead its texture, its process, into something approaching universal beauty—something that speaks beyond the self.

Because of the safety offered to me by each interviewee, I feel comfortable sharing my own story here too, and the ways in which their wisdoms have become little lanterns of orientation, resolve, and stubborn joy as I navigate a particularly thorny chapter of life. Loops of waiting, of uncertainty. Gridlocks of grinding pain. Unknowing, not knowing. Maybe not wanting to know? And yet, from my bed-hospital-tightknit confines, their worlds, and words, continue to wrap around me.

I reflect almost daily on Valériane’s positioning of dress as defiance. For years, like so many chronically ill people, I had arrived at medical appointments looking deliberately dishevelled, as if to say: look at me / believe me / I can’t take care of myself / help. But when I went to my first appointment with my new surgeon, I dressed precisely instead, clutching Val’s words like a talisman, lodged somewhere between skin and fabric, stitched into the very kilt she had made me.

Medicine has long been fascinated by the hysterical woman—by her excess, her desperation, her supposed unreliability. Even the language gives it away: Hysteria. Hysterectomy. A lineage that locates female suffering somewhere between pathology and performance. And within that system, a familiar dynamic can unfold: the doctor as saviour v. the woman as supplicant. For when you are in pain long enough, when you are dismissed often enough, it is frighteningly easy to slip into that posture of helplessness—to become the damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued.

What years of self-advocacy have taught me is that this dynamic is not inevitable. We do not have to be grateful, silent, diminished in order to be treated. We are allowed to question, to insist, to arrive as subjects—NOT victims. Dress, for me, has become one way of rehearsing this refusal: of walking into the room not as a problem to be solved, but as a woman who knows her body, her history, and her right to be heard.

I felt so strong when the surgeon asked me to lift up my clothes to show where the next scars will be—my girl Val—her clothes—had me protected.

When Zeid told me that all he wants is to make women feel beautiful, he railed rightly against fast fashion as a hollow vessel: soulless and careless, frivolous and frail. And I think about this often now, in relation to every piece of clothing that lives in my wardrobe: clothes are not neutral. They communicate in a language inflected by the lilts of their maker: an personal invitation to step into their world, before returning to your own. So I find myself, naturally, choosing designers who honour the female body in all its flux and fluidity—its swelling, softening, tightening, release. Issey Miyake (whose Pleats Please line I swear by for unruly bodies) considered his clothes incomplete until people danced, lived, grew in them. If he wrote the composition, the body is the instrument, and I am the musician.

And then there is Adeju, whose wearable wisdom taught me that clothing can be a form of sovereign intelligence. He speaks often of the violence of being misread, of the pressure to dilute himself as an African designer in Paris—but his garments refuse reduction. They move like negotiations between past and future: ancestral memory, present presence, future figuration. In his hands, cloth thinks through time—and through a body in constant negotiation: between visibility and erasure, between what is legible to others and what remains fiercely private. To dress, through Adeju’s work, is not simply to cover the body, but to assert a way of moving through time and cultures, on one’s own terms and values.

From the 17th of December I’ll be in hospital for surgery, but Moral Threads will continue. I hope you won’t give up on it—because the wisdom each interviewee has shared with me is exactly what keeps me going. These conversations have become small anchors, small lanterns, and I’m grateful to carry them with me into whatever comes next.

I can’t wait to keep sharing their stories with you, and to witness my own growth along the way. Please feel free to reach out with your reflections (madeleine.rothery@gmail.com)—these incredible humans have changed me, and perhaps they’ve changed you too.

As Ram Dass reminds us, “we are all just walking each other home.” <3

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https://www.lagosspaceprogramme.com/

I can pinpoint the first time Lagos Space Programme entered my universe with absolute clarity. It was approaching the end of the Paris AW24 season, that last stretch of fashion week when everything can feel sharp-edged, airless, taut yet Adeju’s PR in Paris, the inimitable David Siwicki, insisted I see LSP’s show. And he was right.

Stepping into the Left Bank apartment where Adeju was showing, I had the sense of arriving somewhere entirely its own; a beauty that felt newly possible; spectral histories gathered in the room. I still think today about this one-and-a half breasted jacket, hand-dyed and painted with a tweed motif according to the Yoruba technique of adire, completed with Benin bronze buttons.

The collection in question was entitled Invitation to Ojude Oba which I had the joy to write about for AnOther: “each look was an elegant, gender-fluid proposition of an ongoing dialogue between Nigerian and British fashion heritages within a decolonised space—neither took precedent over the other.”

Since, Adeju is someone I have deliberately kept in my orbit. For speaking with him is like sitting at the edge of a tide: every sentence arrives textured, tensile, surprising. His mind moves the way indigo disperses through water—slow at first, then suddenly expansive, colouring everything it touches. There is no wasted syllable; the intelligence runs deep, and the integrity runs deeper.

Reading our conversation below, I think you’ll feel it too. Adeju doesn’t turn away from the realities of the industry—its erasures, its blind spots, its exhausting demands—but he meets them with a woven, deliberate clarity. He reminds me that fashion can still be a site of research, rigor, generosity, and truth. That creativity, when held with care, can become a form of resistance.

Finding My Voice, Finding My Way

Fashion’s always been innate for me. My earliest memories are of drawing clothes—fashion drawings, even as a kid. It was just something that came naturally, something I found exciting. I went to fashion school in the UK for a year, but when my grandfather—who was like a father to me—passed away, I couldn’t continue. I had to move back to Nigeria.

But I didn’t come back defeated. I felt equipped. I’d done a foundation year in art and design, and it gave me tools—ways of thinking critically. I was beginning to look back home for inspiration, trying to understand Nigerian culture, design, style from a new place. It was exciting. I showed my portfolio to a few local designers, and they were interested, but no one wanted to pay me. So I thought, fine. I’ll figure it out myself.

That became my path: to understand and cement my point of view. That was always the mission. I wanted to be the best designer I could possibly be. And when you’re good, you get attention. People started noticing. I found a sales agent who told me, “You should be in Paris.” I hadn’t considered it before, but at the time, designers like Kenneth Ize were in Paris, Amaka Osakwe of Maki Oh was showing in New York, so I thought—why not?

We applied to the women’s calendar and didn’t get in, but they said the work was really strong and encouraged us to apply for menswear. Around the same time, I applied for the Woolmark Prize—and I won. That changed everything. Suddenly I was “hot.” I showed in Paris. But looking back now, I laugh. I had no network, no foundation. I was in the most competitive fashion capital in the world, with no team, no contacts, just a strong collection and pure intention.

If I could go back, I would’ve done things differently. I would have grown more organically, built community, stayed rooted. But back then, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I thought, this is where great design is recognised, so this must be the way.

On Being “Too African”

Paris was hard. Really hard. I had to build everything from scratch. And beyond the logistics, I constantly faced this quiet wall of doubt, of erasure. There was one editor who met with me—respected, established. I spoke to her about my Invitation to Ojude Oba AW24 collection, the politics, the cultural references. She just didn’t get it. It was like: why is a Nigerian designer referencing the Prince of Wales? But that’s colonial history. That’s how culture works. Japanese designers are allowed to collage references and be complex. African designers are expected to stay in their box.

There was one buyer who said to my agent that Lagos Space Programme was “too African.” What does that even mean? The collection she was referring to was shot at the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove—an ancient, deeply spiritual space. It’s a living archive. That’s not “too African.” That’s punk. That’s history, philosophy, futurism, all at once. But people don’t see that. They see “Africa” and they expect lions and wax print.

My work draws from deep Nigerian traditions—but I push it somewhere else. My clothes are minimalist, experimental, often called “Belgian” in spirit. People are always surprised when they see them in person. Then it’s like, “Oh wow, this is really conceptual, really refined.” And I’m like—yes. I know. This is my food. This is where I live.

There was even a stylist from Dazed who complimented my stylist at the show and wouldn’t even look me in the face. As if I hadn’t made the collection myself. Like I was just a body standing there. It was humiliating. And that wasn’t an isolated experience.

I had to fight for people to even see me. I started physically pulling buyers back into the showroom. Dressing models in front of them. Explaining every detail. Only then would they start to engage. That level of labour just to be seen as valid? It wears you down.

And still—after all that—some wouldn’t buy. They’d say it didn’t fit the market. Or that they’d already bought one African designer recently. One. As if there’s only room for one.

Community, Confidence & Starting Again

All of this has made me rethink everything. I didn’t have the right community. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider—socially, emotionally. I’m not the girl at the rave. I’m not out at parties. I’m in the studio. I’m a reader. A researcher. A nerd. Lagos Space Programme didn’t grow around a scene or a tribe—it was just me, trying to build something alone. And in Paris, if you don’t have a tribe, you fall flat.

But I’m also realising: I can start again.

Winning the Woolmark Prize gave me $130,000 (USD). I spent it wrong. I thought I had to show. I thought I had to perform. But now I know better. If I’d used that money to build infrastructure in Nigeria, to deepen my community, to expand the world of Lagos Space Programme locally—we’d be in a different place. I think about my friend Bubu Ogisi (of IAMISIGO) —her work, her shows, her world. People show up for her. She didn’t chase Paris. She made her own rules. I admire that so deeply.

Now I’m trying to build something slower, more intentional. I’ve been working on a new plan, and there’s interest from people who believe in what I’m building. But I’m cautious. I don’t want to be pushed back into Paris before I’ve built a foundation. Not spectacle. Not another expensive cycle of shows without real roots. I want to do this differently this time—sustainably, truthfully, at my own pace.

That’s why I’ve applied for The Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. It’s a year-long research position with the freedom to travel and build. My proposal is a documentary on adire, the Yoruba indigo dye tradition. It doesn’t exist yet, and I want to make that history visible. And that’s not a side project—that’s Lagos Space Programme too. Research, memory, theory—they’re all part of the brand.

Because my work has always been a cultural consideration. That’s what I said in my first ever interview. I didn’t get into this for vibes. I’m not here to be sexy. I’m here to build something rigorous, something real.

Reclaiming Control

Right now, I want to show one collection a year. That’s what works for me. The strongest collections I’ve made are the ones I had time to build. Where I could sit with the ideas. The ones I rushed? I knew they weren’t right, even if people said they loved them.

And I want to be unapologetically African. I want to create activations. I want to host conversations. I want people to understand what LSP is. I want to sell to people who feel the clothes. Because the people who buy them love them. They just don’t always post on Instagram. That’s OK. But I need to tell the story better. Create context. Build bridges.

Someone once told me to dumb it down. To post less intellectual things. That broke my heart. Because I’m proud of how I think. I’m proud that I can articulate my work. That I’ve read the books. That I can place my clothes in a broader conversation. I’m not going to shrink myself to fit someone else’s feed. If the industry can’t hold that—it’s the industry that needs to expand.

I’ve had moments where I wondered: should I stop being “African”? Should I edit that out? But the truth is, I’m proud. I’m Nigerian. My work is Nigerian. And I want to show that Nigerian design can be conceptual. It can be rigorous. It can be weird. It can be romantic. It can be soft. It can be everything.

Now I finally feel confident enough to say no. No to rushing. No to minimising. No to playing a game I didn’t sign up for. What I want is to grow this project—slowly, sustainably, truthfully. Maybe Paris again one day. But only when it makes sense for me.

Adeju’s words to live by: authenticity over approval.
(I try to live by the idea that creativity is an act of reclamation, a means to restore, reframe, and remember. For me, the goal is to make work that feels truthful, that honours where I come from, and that contributes something lasting to the cultural landscape.)

Pass it on—3 creatives Adeju thinks are worth our attention:

Lukhanyo Mdingi: whose work carries a deep sense of human integrity @lukhanyomdingi

Sindiso Khumalo: who brings archival South African narratives into contemporary fashion beautifully @sindisokhumalo

TJ Who: whose design language feels quietly powerful and rooted in modern craftsmanship @tjwho

Thank you, dear Adeju, for sharing your wild intelligence, your history, your culture in compact dreams that ask us to stand more truthfully in our place on this earth.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

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https://independantesdecoeur.com/

There’s a funny building in East London—its location I won’t reveal—that feels like an unending maze of creativity. It was there I first met Valériane—I was visiting two friends, Nic and Ben, the jewellery designers behind CC-Steding, and next thing I knew, we were all drinking wine and smoking rollie cigarettes out the window of their studio.

I remember that first meeting, being completely awestruck by the way Val navigates fabric: fluent, instinctive, reverent. Her relationship to cloth is not just technical but emotional, ancestral, knowing. Dressed in her pieces, my femininity becomes a kind of currency—a way to claim and protect my space, my body, my womanhood.

The name of her label says it all, really. It’s borrowed from the infamous 19th-century courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne, who wrote in her will that despite society’s judgement—for being a woman, for being a sex worker—she had always been indépendante de cœur. Independent at heart. Aren’t we all?

Val is an artist in the way that word should still mean something: fashion is just her tool to digest different disciplines, from music to anthropology to feminism. Beyond her own label, she’s crafted sculptural headpieces for Comme des Garçons, and custom looks for performers like The Horrors, Anohni, and Arca.

If I’ve known Val for several years now, I’d never had the opportunity to dive deep into her creativity—until now. And suddenly, it all makes sense. Dressmaking was her first language; style came before speech; a fluency that has only deepened through the texture of lived experience.

I especially loved her reflections on clothing as a way to claim space and express selfhood as a child—and I encourage you to think about your own. I, for one, used to refuse all the beautiful dresses my mum bought me, insisting instead on wearing a Batman costume. I wonder what that says about me…

Adornment as Primary Language

I grew up in a tiny village in Alsace, in the middle of nowhere basically, tucked in between the mountains and Germany. From my parents’ stories, as soon as I started talking, I was asking my grandmothers to make me dresses. I wanted them to be flat on the top and floaty on the bottom, with little ruffle socks to go with my black patent shoes. And my mum said I was throwing tantrums if my socks didn’t match my dress for school! I have no memory of it, but it makes sense. Marie Antoinette is my birthday buddy—so maybe I’m her fashion reincarnation?

When I was nine or ten, I remember going with my parents to buy clothes at the supermarket. Just, you know, cheap stuff. And I saw this black poncho and a little velvet Gavroche hat that I wanted so badly. My mum bought them for me, but no one at school was wearing anything like it. All the kids were in Adidas and Nike tracksuits. I showed up in my little outfit, and I still remember the effect it had. I was very shy, but people were talking about it. I felt seen, I guess.

Even back then, before I had words for it, I think dressing and style were my first language—without even understanding it was one.

It’s funny because lately I’ve been trying to understand the idea of taste. How it forms through life—what you see, what you hear, the people that surround you. But I also think maybe some part of it was just in me. Because really, where the fuck did it come from? My parents aren’t in any creative field. Not into fashion. Nothing. And I was just obsessed; from the moment I could start dressing—kind of funny enough.

When I was a teenager—my parents divorced when I was eight—I had a stepmother. She hated me, and I hated her. I remember provoking her back then. I must’ve been about fourteen: my dad and my stepmum were invited to a wedding, and I wore the craziest open-back dress—like literally, you could almost see my butt crack. You could see everything, basically.

But I felt untouchable. And it’s a passive act, it’s not an argument or hurling mean words at each other—it’s just something you wear. I actually got refused access to the church, which I was happy about in a cheeky, rebellious teen kind of way.

You have no power when you’re young. I had zero control over this situation that I hated. I think dress was my way to reclaim a little bit of control at an age when so little is.

And maybe that energy is still in the clothes I make now.

Reclaiming the Dressed Body

I remember my grandmother telling me she’d always wanted to go to art school, but her father said it was “only for gays and lesbians.” I was so shocked. She didn’t even get to choose her education—her life. That stuck with me. Now, I always think of freedom: of movement, of choice, of what we can do as women. One of the only ways we can assert to the world that we are free is by doing what we want with our clothing and our bodies—we decide what we show and what we don’t.

My feminism comes from my life’s soup. All the little ingredients: early boyfriends saying, “You can’t wear sneakers, it’s not feminine,” the pressure from everyone about how you should dress, how you should fit in. I remember being a teenager and feeling so angry—like, why can’t I just be myself?

I wanted to go to fashion school in Paris since forever, but my parents didn’t let me. So, I just… went. I applied behind their backs, and when Atelier Chardon Savard called me in for an interview, I hopped on a train without telling anyone. I’d been living out of home since I was fifteen, working various jobs to support myself. I called a nightclub promoter I knew in Paris, said I was bringing my friend Chloé, and crashed at his place. When my dad picked me up from the station, I just said, “I had an interview in Paris.” And that was that.

I think it’s become my mission, in a way, to empower women. I have this genuine affection for women—this need to help my fellow women feel their best. To feel confident and untouchable. Like that feeling when you’re listening to a really good song just before a date—that kind of untouchable confidence. I think women should feel that every day.

Something I love is dismantling and reassembling the symbols of femininity—cutting, sculpting, exaggerating. I go through phases myself, sometimes more masculine, sometimes more feminine. That shift between energies—that flexibility—is part of the design too.

There’s so much coming at us from the outside—expectations, judgment, fear. If my clothes can build a small world of beauty and protection around a woman, then that’s everything.

Memory, Material, Meaning

Indépendantes de Coeur happened naturally. I started by making dresses for myself, then for friends. Then people started asking. It just grew. Organically, almost mechanically. There was never a business plan, just a feeling.

I’ve always loved working with antique fabrics—old linens, textured cottons, second-hand bolts I find on the hunt. There’s something so poetic about them. They’ve been stained by time, shaped by hands before mine. They carry weight, history. I like the idea that I’m adding another layer to the story.

But I never make it too literal. I’m not turning a 200-year-old sheet into a Victorian nightgown. I like tension. Something old, sculpted into a sharp, modern silhouette. That’s where the magic happens.

And it’s good for the body too. I’ve read that linen actually vibrates with your body’s frequency. Polyester doesn’t. It’s dead. Linen breathes.

Of course, antique fabric can be tricky—too thick, too fragile. But I wash everything myself, take time with it. And I love offering aftercare, small alterations down the line—if someone’s body changes, or they want to shift a detail. It makes the garment live longer.

There are hard days. Waiting on invoices, wondering if sales will come through. But I’ve learned not to tie success to money. What sustains me is my community—my friends, my collaborators, the people I make for. That’s priceless.

And when things get too much, I just go back to making. No mood board. No deadlines. Just me, sewing something for myself. That’s how I return to the why.

One of my favourite things is the custom work. A performer will come to me and say, “I want to be this character on stage,” and we dream it into being together. It’s like co-creation. I get to study how women see themselves—what they want to show, what they want to hide or enhance. It’s psychological. Even anthropological, sometimes. The clothes are just one part of it.

People always say it’s about empowerment, but honestly, that word gets thrown around so much. For me, it’s more about crafting an emotional armour—but without losing the softness underneath.

If my work contributes anything to fashion, I hope it’s a message of freedom. For women, for art, for anyone trying to feel at home in their own skin.

Val’s words to live by: what else would I do?
( I also have quotes that I leave everywhere. So nice to find in your pockets or laptop or on the studio floor sometimes , my recent one is “Art has always been the raft under which we climb to save our sanity.” Helps me remember the value of the craft, how precious it is, how much beauty you can insert and spread out for other people to feel... How sane it keeps us, all of us!)

Pass it on—3 creatives Val thinks are worth our attention:

Alexia Marmara: painter, archivist, researcher @alexia.marmara

CC-Steding: jewellery makers @ccsteding

Nil Mutluer: culinary masterchef @healgoblin

Pieces I think are worth investing in…

The Kilt: Val’s signature. Elegant with an edge, adjustable for a lifetime of wear, and stitched with a discrete heart on the back; protection, of sorts. Trust me, everyone needs an IDC kilt.

The Convertible Leather Jacket: I’ve worn it myself—the leather is soft like skin, holds shape like armour. Lined in linen, sleeves fastened by a hook and ring. It’s alive; a fierce guardian of spirit and soul.

Merci, dear Valériane, for allowing us to travel through your world, from the past to the now—and for the permission you give us all to dress fully in our power, our selfhood, our dreams.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

@zeidhijazi

https://www.zeidhijazi.com/

I first came across designer Zeid Hijazi on Instagram many, many moons ago, and we’ve been in contact ever since. I’ve always had a soft spot for embroidery (how much can be held in a stitch!) and fell immediately in love with his fluency in weaving the traditional craftsmanship of his Palestinian heritage into soulful, contemporary silhouettes—an “Arab futurism,” as he so calls it, with the beauty of the feminine figure as its tether.

A testament to his talent: just two days ago, Rama Duwaji, the wife of the newly elected mayor of NYC, wore one of his designs as her husband, Zohran Mamdani, accepted the win.

When I first started imagining this project, I knew Zeid would be the first person I’d want to interview; I sensed there was a special kind of magic, humility, and spirituality to his story. And I wasn’t wrong. Below, the designer divinely shares his background, his call to fashion, and the mental health struggles that ultimately led him to create from a place guided by something larger than all of us.

As someone who also wrestles with mental health, I so appreciated the safe space that opened between us during this conversation. Those sneaky, dark pockets of my mind felt a little less frightening, and a lot more precious, after speaking with Zeid. And I couldn’t agree with him more: it’s in darkness that we find our inner light—and that sense of self shines brighter than any accolade.

Fashion as Storytelling in the Middle East

I grew up in Jordan, and I was always amused by the power of dressing up. My first real encounter with fashion was through my sister: she was starring in a school play about mannequins coming to life in an atelier at midnight. They started fighting about who looked better, who looked more glamorous. My sister’s mannequin was dressed in the Palestinian thobe, and the others were in these Y2K white outfits. They all made fun of her. But then she had to narrate the story of what she was wearing—and it was like an explosion of colours. I remember thinking, “oh my God, fashion is so cool.”

That moment stayed with me. And of course, watching my mum and my sister dress up had an impact too. In the Middle East, weddings are extravagant—people go all out. I think it’s another story of a kid who grew up watching the women around him and got influenced by it.

Being a fashion designer was always in my head, but I was scared to say it out loud. I was a man, and in our society, there are stereotypes. But when I told my parents, they were really open-minded. They actually sent me to the best school, which I’m very thankful for. I’m 27 now, and I graduated last year. It took me three years to get into Central Saint Martins. The acceptance rate is so low. I didn’t get in the first time, so I took gap years, did short courses, built my portfolio.

There was even this prize for graduates from a new entity and I kind of faked it. I wasn’t a graduate—I’d just done a lot of short courses. But I applied, and I won. That prize helped me release my first collection. Journalists liked it, and I was supposed to go further—to do the second, third, fourth collections—but then everything stopped.

Mental Health, Spiritual Awakening, and the Cost of Creativity

Before my final year, I was doing a lot of weed. It got me into psychosis. That experience changed everything. When you’re creative, it’s like a machine, constantly generating ideas. But when you’re tormented, that machine just stops working. I didn’t release my graduate collection because I didn’t like it. I didn’t feel creative. It triggered a manic episode, then depression. I turned from someone into someone else. I wasn’t myself for years.

I always say it was the best and the worst thing that happened to me. It was such a spiritual experience—it opened me up to bigger things. I became obsessed with the mysteries of the universe. Why are we here? What’s our purpose? Even after the mania ended, my brain was still in a kind of warfare. I had to understand what I’d gone through. It wasn’t just something to “get over.” I mean, suddenly thinking you’re the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—when you know nothing about Jesus Christ—there must be something in that.

Now, thank God, I’m medicated. I’m doing really well. I haven’t had an episode in a long time. But for years, I was more occupied by the spiritual side of what happened than by fashion. I couldn’t release a proper second collection. My dad has offered to support the business—but I’ve been too scared. What if I don’t get any buyers? What if people judge me?

I was really bullied in school, and that stays with you. Even now, when I design, I hear those voices in my head, and I’ll stop for two days. That judgment, that fear, it gets in the way. But I’m doing better now. I’m designing again, I’m doing side projects.

And you know, in fashion, everyone’s anti-taking time off. The pressure is real. But I realised—I have a calling. My desire is to dress women, and to become one of the biggest creative directors in the world. Not from ego, but because it’s my destiny. And to get there, I’ll face challenges that will shape me. They’ll teach me how to handle success when it comes.

Someone once asked me, what kind of support do designers need? Three years ago, I would’ve said mental health. But now I believe mental health struggles are symptoms of something deeper. We’ve lost our spiritual connection. Being spiritual means surrendering to the unknown. When you surrender, your anxiety can start to fade. But we’re afraid to surrender. We’re afraid to look inside.

I’ve been studying Kabbalah, which teaches that we are light. And the brighter your light, the more energy it can attract. But if your light is dim, you won’t receive much. Instead of worrying about turnover and revenue, we should care about what’s going on inside.

Palestinian Identity as Lineage, Not Aesthetic

Yes, I’m Palestinian. And I get so much pressure to make everything about that. But here’s the thing—sometimes I just want to make a sexy dress. Or a really well-tailored blazer. That doesn’t mean I’m not Palestinian. I am. But it’s in my blood. In my trauma. In my ancestry. It’s not a flag I perform.

My work comes from a deep place. The collection I’m working on now is called Knightmare—with a K, like “knight.” It’s about going into your subconscious, facing a tormented soul, fighting your inner demons. And a lot of that torment comes from intergenerational trauma. What my ancestors went through—occupation, displacement—it shows up in me. It might be mental illness, it might be autoimmune disease, but it’s in the bloodline.

That’s why I use embroidery. It’s not just aesthetic, it’s storytelling. When a woman puts that needle into fabric, she’s giving birth to something. That soul stays in the garment. That’s identity, memory. My ancestors passed that knowledge down generation to generation. The embroidery becomes like a holy book; it holds ancient wisdom and it preserves our history.

And when someone wears that piece, they insert their own story. It becomes theirs too.

I hate fast fashion—not just because of labour exploitation, but because there’s no soul in it. Those clothes are hollow. I believe every garment should be a vessel for memory. A way to love yourself. Because when a woman puts something on and feels good, it changes her energy. It raises her vibration. And when you love yourself, you attract better things.

That’s what I want to do. That’s how I give love.

Zeid’s words to live by: “Nothing changes if nothing changes.”

Pass it on—3 creatives Zeid thinks are worth our attention:

Cynthia Merhej, of Renaissance Renaissance @renaissance_renaissance

Sabreen Hassan, CSM classmate and super talented CSM designer

Andrew Demetry, Founder of @nafs.space @drew.demetry

Pieces I think are worth investing in…

The Frequency Top (worn by Rama Duwaji): laser-cut denim embroidered with signature motifs, created using a low-impact technique that forgoes harmful dyes and minimises water waste.

The Temple Pants: impeccably cut in raw cotton, with intricate embroidery delicately hand-stitched by Palestinian craftswomen in Jordan.

Thank you, Zeid, for so generously sharing your story—and for offering us each clear-eyed wisdom, soft guidance, and embodied inspiration for our own creative journeys.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing—or buy me a coffee—to support more conversations like this.

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I started this project out of frustration with an industry that feels increasingly stagnant and stuck within a Eurocentric bind—the same names everywhere, fast fashion polluting the underbelly, and too little support for new voices. Fashion at its best is expansive and imaginative, and I believe it’s emerging talent who keep it alive.

Fashion is the language I return to. I began as a lawyer, moved into the art world, and eventually fell in love with fashion’s rare hybrid of creativity and utility. I love the versatile acumen of designers, and how their work constantly makes me reconsider the ways I live in my body, and through the world around me.

Here I profile designers whose work I believe is worth your attention and investment — not just for what they create, but for why they do it. Each conversation explores care, ethics, quality, and culture, told in their own words. More than anything, Moral Threads is about optimism: celebrating the people who light up my soul and, I hope, will spark yours too.

Thread by thread, these voices are reweaving what fashion can mean across cultures—binding us, artfully, into a global fabric of care.

Subscribe now