The Unseen Battleground of Middle Eastern Fashion

Feb 18, 2025

A woman in a dark hijab, wearing gold and gemstone jewelry, holds a black perfume bottle. The image highlights the intersection of modern luxury and traditional style.

A woman wearing gold and gemstone jewelry holds a black perfume bottle, reflecting the blend of contemporary luxury and traditional aesthetics in Middle Eastern fashion. (Source: Shutterstock)

Fashion Trust Arabia (FTA) positions itself as the patron of emerging designers from the Middle East, an industry often overshadowed by Western dominance. The initiative, founded in 2018 by Lebanese entrepreneur Tania Fares and supported by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar, has filled a gap long ignored by global luxury houses: early-stage support for designers navigating the intricate world of retail, production, and brand positioning.

But how effective is FTA in changing the industry’s center of gravity? The region has seen a surge in talent—Jordanian-Palestinian designer Zeid Hijazi is redefining menswear with deconstructed tailoring, while Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed Ashi, founder of Ashi Studio, has dressed Beyoncé and Zendaya, proving that Arab couture can command global attention. However, breaking into the international market requires more than talent. The European fashion establishment often demands a blend of commercial viability and cultural familiarity that many regional designers struggle to balance.

Unlike LVMH’s Prize for Young Fashion Designers, which positions its winners within a well-oiled system, FTA operates in a fragmented landscape where luxury production is concentrated in Paris and Milan, and regional retail infrastructure remains inconsistent. Designers like Bahrain’s Hala Kaiksow, known for her handcrafted textiles, and Egypt’s Mariam Yehia of Maison Yeya have managed to carve out space, but their expansion remains a slow, resource-intensive process.

What FTA offers—grants, mentorship, and international exposure—is critical. But for Arab designers to truly shift fashion’s power dynamics, they must also reckon with the industry's deeper structural challenges: the absence of high-end manufacturing hubs in the Gulf, the still-nascent regional fashion journalism ecosystem, and the limited number of Middle Eastern buyers on the Parisian front row. FTA is a necessary step, but the region’s designers may still find that the true test of their longevity is whether the Middle Eastern market itself begins to invest in fashion not just as an aesthetic endeavor, but as an economic force.