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The most striking thing about first encountering one of Nazzal Studio’s pieces is the grandeur of its silhouette. The designs take voluminous forms: enormous puffer coats that cocoon around the body, their swaddling stoles filled with down, gargantuan bows elegantly affixing their drape. “I wanted these garments to be so big, to take up so much space that you can’t look away,” explains its founder, 23-year-old Sylwia Nazzal. “I wanted them to be so in your face that you can’t avoid them. You have to look. You have to hear my message.”
The most recent recipient of Fashion Trust Arabia’s Franca Sozzani Debut Talent award, Nazzal’s message is inexorably interlinked with the very essence of her pieces. The young designer was raised in Jordan among a proudly Palestinian family, and “Palestine was always a topic when I was growing up: that I need to be proud of [my heritage], that I need to claim it,” she explains. “We claim our identity so wilfully because it’s under threat.” But she also grew up on MTV-era pop culture, amidst a Jordanian fashion landscape that she describes as “extremely Westernised”, and within a global climate that regularly marginalises the voices of Arab creatives. Yet, she continues, “as I started to get older, and my frontal lobe started awakening, I woke up to the fact that I’m Palestinian, I’m Arab – and that I’m proud of my culture, my heritage, my roots.”
It was advocating that attitude that inspired the formation of Fashion Trust Arabia – “to support, promote and elevate emerging fashion talent from the MENA region,” explains Tania Fares, who launched the initiative six years ago alongside co-chair Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. “There is almost no recognition of MENA talent globally, and the FTA is the one unique opportunity for young designers to be seen and recognised,” affirms creative director Ruba Abu-Nimah, who sat on the panel of judges this year. “We saw the immense creative potential in this region that was often underrepresented on the global stage,” continues Fares. “While the Western framework has traditionally dominated fashion, MENA designers bring fresh perspectives rooted in their cultural backgrounds, which deserve independent recognition.”
It was while she was studying at university, at Parsons Paris, that that sentiment began to translate into Sylwia’s work, when she was tasked with integrating her cultural heritage with Norma Kamali’s designs for her sophomore project. The process that unfolded prompted the realisation that, despite her desire to explore Palestinian identity, there was a severe lack of reference points for her to work from: that she struggled to source materials that documented a rich culture; that her history had regularly been disregarded, or worse, decimated. But, when she visited Palestine, a wealth of materials began to reveal themselves: scrapbooks documenting traditional dress, carefully preserved by local families she met, or shopkeepers she chatted with. After speaking together they would often, she recalls, quietly pull out books of their own compiled imagery for her to photograph on her phone. At one small museum, she convinced them to let her buy a CD-Rom of a 1950s home video they were playing, overdubbed in Spanish; at a library, she found a Chinese book about Palestinian dress that offered her far more than what she had been able to find online.
“When I was looking at all of these things, I just thought: wow. Our culture, it’s so traditional, so special, so rich, so elegant. How have I ever looked anywhere else?” These images became her inspiration, integrated with the way that the people she met wore their clothes – and the imagery that has, particularly over the past year, become the most familiar visual of Palestinian identity: that of resistance. “When I was researching, talking about Palestine and traditional dress and all of this… I was just thinking, ‘how can I speak about this heritage without speaking about the fact that it’s being erased?’” explains Sylwia. “My teachers, and people, would say to me: ‘do not go political. No one will hire you. Just focus. You did not go into politics.’ But I would wonder: how do you expect me to talk about Palestine without talking about the genocide?”
So she stuck with her instincts, exploring images of Palestinian citizens accosted by Israeli military, and examining how one man’s clothes were distorted when they were pulled in different directions by three soldiers; or the way that another tied his jacket around his neck after being apprehended. Integrated with the way a keffiyeh scarf is traditionally tied, the curved silhouette of a hijab, or the imposing elegance of a Khimar, she established a language that simultaneously preserves the beauty of her culture while acknowledging the painful realities that have become a part of its ongoing narrative – in her words: “You view its beauty, and at the same time, its resistance.” Inside her pieces, some of the names of the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have lost their lives to the ongoing conflict are spelled out, written on red lining.
“I was interested in the idea that there’s not a brand that is super political and ethical – we don’t really have people speaking out about things beyond what I call ‘appropriate’ politics,” explains Sylwia. “Every time I would speak about Palestine, I would be dismissed or shut down. I realise that these are politics that people don’t want to talk about, these are things that people want to shy away from. And that’s exactly why I wanted to hold on to it more.”
“In a world with an ongoing genocide and a mostly silent industry, for a young designer to create work from protest and from conviction is a sign of courage and fortitude,” attests Ruba. “She has been vilified and lost much support and never gave up. On top of all that, she is extremely talented: her work is modern, highly conceptual, elegant and wearable.”
That is what is just so striking about Nazzal Studio. While the pieces are rich with meaning, and carry a profound weight – particularly in the context of the past year – they are also, simply, exceptionally good. The hijab hoodie, slouchingly cool yet exactingly cut, would stand out even without the story of its inception; the dramatic silhouettes, which draw upon traditional Arabic forms, maintain a compelling, contemporary elegance. When Saint Levant appeared on stage at Coachella this summer wearing her keffiyeh hoodie and camel trousers, he looked, to put it plainly, cool.
But Sylwia’s desire to operate in the ethical space extends beyond aesthetics: her intention, she explains, is to scale up and create a network of employment. For example, one of her most visually impactful pieces – a shimmering wealth of 10,000 coins that appear at once like gleaming fish scales and like armour – was hand-made alongside a group of Palestinian refugee women based in one of the two camps in Jordan. While they all sewed together, “they were telling me stories about themselves, and about the country that I never grew up in,” says Sylwia. “And I realized how much I would love this to be the way I create all my garments. Inshallah, eventually I am producing more, and I want to build a structure that supports women’s time, bodies, religion. To create meaningful work with people who deserve to be compensated properly.”
Hers is a message that deserves to be uplifted, told through work that deserves a platform, and she’s intent on making it heard. “People are telling me, ‘you can do more than just political work,’” she smiles. “But I’m like: but the political work is what needs to be done.”