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“Everyone worldwide eats Middle Eastern food,” says the Lebanese-born fashion philanthropist Tania Fares. “But no one knows a thing about its fashion designers.” Until now, that is. This week, Fares launched Fashion Trust Arabia — a non-profit mentorship and financial prize programme for emerging designers across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa, which aims to give winning designers international exposure. “There is a lot of talent in the region, but there’s a lack of support,” says Fares. “We’re creating a structure within the industry there from scratch.”
With the exception of brands such as tuxedo-based label Racil, handbag designer Nathalie Trad and couturier Elie Saab, few Arabian designers have broken out on the international scene. Racil Chalhoub, who launched her eponymous label in Paris and whose designs are stocked at MatchesFashion.com, MyTheresa and Bergdorf Goodman, says it would have been “a lot harder” for her brand to achieve such international success had she done so from the Middle East.
“It sometimes feels like we are trying to give birth to an entire industry here,” says Amman-based designer Nafsika Skourti, who launched her namesake label in 2014. As well as production issues, Skourti points to the lack of access to quality models, photographers and stylists as difficulties of operating in the region.
“Launching a brand in Arabia is very challenging,” says Fares, of a region that lacks infrastructure and official fashion week programmes. “The ability to deliver orders on time, company growth . . . it’s difficult for designers,” she says. “Let’s say you’re an Arab designer within the Arab world and you have your e-commerce but you want to launch internationally. How do you ship? How do you price? Who is there to guide you?”
Establishing such an initiative in the Middle East was a natural next step in Fares’ philanthropic adventures. She launched a similar scheme — Fashion Trust — in the UK, in 2011, in partnership with the British Fashion Council. To date, the UK Fashion Trust has awarded ￡1.6m to designers — recipients include Christopher Kane, Peter Pilotto and Roksanda Ilincic. “I love young designers,” says Fares, “but I was born in Beirut, so it’s good to give something back to my part of the world.” For the FTA’s co-chair, Sheikha al-Mayassa Bint Hamad Al-Thani, the project has an even deeper cultural resonance. “This initiative has the potential to be transformative,” she says, “helping to build bridges of understanding between our culture and others.”
Fashion Trust Arabia arrives at an opportune moment, when modest fashion and diversity are buzzwords in the industry. It began with a trickle in 2016, with the launch of abaya collections from Dolce & Gabbana and the Japanese high street retailer Uniqlo. Today, Net-a-Porter offers an Eid edit, while online retailer The Modist — founded in 2017 by the Algerian entrepreneur Ghizlan Guenez — this year created Layeur, an in-house line of modest, sophisticated separates that are targeted at the international consumer.
Meanwhile, the Middle Eastern market holds a promise of explosive growth. Thomson Reuters projects that global fashion spending by Muslims will reach $373bn by 2022. Qatar, an oil-rich state that has the largest GDP per capita in the world at around $128,000, has a flourishing fashion economy despite last year’s political and diplomatic tensions. Fares’ initiative is part of a bigger global shift away from the west, seen with the launch of websites such as Industrie Africa, which connects designers across the continent.
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