Threads of Palestine

Ten Palestinian Designers you need to know

Written by: Lucy Dover (@luce_dover_)

Fashion is never just about clothes. For Palestinian designers, it has long been a language of survival, resistance, and identity. In a world where their people continue to live under genocide and apartheid, every stitch, cut, and silhouette carries weight. These garments are not only aesthetic expressions but political ones, challenging erasure while insisting on visibility.

At a time when Palestine’s very existence is under threat, these designers are reshaping what it means to wear culture, to wear memory, and to wear defiance. Their work makes clear that fashion can hold grief and resistance, but also joy, futurity, and hope. Each piece becomes more than clothing. It is a declaration that Palestine is alive, creative, and unyielding. By reimagining heritage techniques, experimenting with radical forms, and placing Palestinian narratives at the centre of their practice, these designers show that fashion can be both a mirror of the past and a blueprint for the future: a future where their people will no longer suffer under Apartheid regime. In this struggle, We are all Palestinians.

Here are ten Palestinian Designers that you need to know about:

Ayham Hassan

Ayham Hassan is a Palestinian fashion designer, originally from Ramallah. He grew up under the oppressive Israeli Occupying Force, and would watch YouTube videos of Alexander McQueen shows as form of escape. Determined to carve out a space for himself, he launched a crowdfunder to study at Central Saint Martins in 2021, boosted by Bella Hadid sharing his campaign, and eventually made the move to London.

Photography by Nicola Delorme

Now, Hassan is one of the most talked-about graduates of the year. His collection, Immortal Magenta was showcased on the 4th June 2025 and is a visceral response to the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing attempt to erase Palestinian identity. Magenta, he explains, is a colour that doesn’t exist in the natural spectrum, only in the mind’s eye - just like Palestinians, made invisible, denied, and erased. His clothes push against that invisibility with radical silhouettes in saturated blues, purples, and pinks, layered with the weight of history. Techniques like tessreem patchwork, Majdalawi weaving, and cross-stitch embroidery surface in his work, not as nostalgic gestures, but as active resistance: a way of archiving culture while reinventing it for the future. For Hassan, to create is not just to design, but to defy.

Tali Marjieh – Martal

Tali Marjieh, a 25-year-old Palestinian-Chilean designer and stylist, is the visionary forging the visual world of her pop-star sister, Elyanna. Raised in Palestine, Marjieh turned cultural longing into creative impulse, melding tatreez, gilded coins, henna, shells, and lace into Arab‑futurist silhouettes that feel both ancient and contemporary.

But Marjieh is more than a stylist to her sister: she’s the founder of MARTAL, a label born from the hunt for pieces that didn’t exist and designs she always wanted to wear but never found. Her designs are a mix of western and eastern artistry. Her career-defining moment? The design and styling of Elyanna’s “Late Night Show with Stephen Colbert” debut. Wrapped in Arabic textiles, crowned with a keffiyeh, and dripping in coins, that look was a personal and political statement. It was one that brought layers of Palestinian identity into a mainstream moment that rarely sees them.

Sylwia Nazzal – Nazzal Studio

Photography by @zaidalloz

Sylwia Nazzal is a 24-year‑old Palestinian‑Jordanian and the creative force behind Nazzal Studio and is crafting fashion that refuses to be polite. Raised in Jordan within a fiercely proud Palestinian household, she watched pop culture and Western styles dominate her surroundings, while heritage quietly fought for space.

Nazzal’s graduate thesis, What Should Have Been Home, was equally elegant and confrontational. At its heart was a puffer lined in red, embroidered with the names of tens of thousands of Palestinians lost in the violent wake of genocide. They were not statistics, but human echoes against erasure. Adjacent works include a shimmering full‑coin ensemble which is made up of 72 kilograms of coins, hand‑stitched by refugee women. Her creative process draws deeply from the fragile archive of Palestinian visual history. Unable to find traditional references online, she turned offline: scrapbooks held by families, a CD‑ROM of 1950s home footage found in a museum, even a Chinese‑language book on Palestinian dress in a library. Nazzal's designs have been proudly worn by Palestinian musicians Saint Levant and Zeyne.

Nafsika Skourti

Founded in 2014 by Greek-Palestinian designer Nafsika Skourti and her sister Stephanie, the Amman-based label has become one of the Middle East’s most compelling names in luxury fashion. Known for its ethos of “everyday glamour,” Nafsika Skourti reimagines wardrobe staples through a lens of deconstruction and duality where she balances statement with subtlety and glamour with anti-glamour.

The label’s DNA is rooted in experimentation: eclectic textile work, contemporary silhouettes, and couture-level craftsmanship honed through Nafsika’s training at Central Saint Martins, Marchesa in New York, and at the famed École Lesage in Paris. This grounding in haute couture techniques merges with a rebellious design philosophy, producing separates that are both elevated and endlessly remixable.

Omar Braika & Shukri Lawrence – Trashy clothing

Founded in 2017 by Shukri Lawrence and Omar Braika, Trashy Clothing is a Palestinian brand that uses satire, kitsch, and camp as weapons of resistance. What began as a tongue-in-cheek streetwear label has grown into a platform that confronts authority head-on, drawing from the lived realities of queerness, occupation, and exile. Their AW25 collection, Humiliation Rituals, is a biting commentary on dominance and power, with militarised silhouettes, sword motifs, and slogans like “Made by refugee women” stitched into its fabric.

Trashy thrives in contradiction: glamour clashing with the grotesque, protest graphics colliding with pop-cultural nostalgia. Past collections have reimagined Arab pop divas like Haifa Wehbe and Sherihan as icons of survival, while Pride campaigns exposed the violence behind rainbow-washed marketing. By reclaiming “trash” aesthetics, the brand destabilises expectations of what Palestinian fashion can be. For Trashy, fashion is a provocation and a performance, one that refuses invisibility and insists on visibility. It is loud, camp, and unapologetically resistant

Aminah & Hussein Musa – PaliRoots

PaliRoots was launched in 2016 by siblings Aminah and Hussein Musa as a brand, and a bridge, between diaspora and heritage. Born in Jerusalem and raised in the US, the two built everything by hand, shipping from their living room, sleeping beside stock, rooted in a desire to resurrect stories buried by time and conflict. What began as nostalgia evolved into a platform for resistance, for culture, for presence.

Each collection from PaliRoots is a gesture of remembrance. Their designs which include embroidered shirts, bandanas, keffiyehs and vintage-inspired jerseys, are modest in form but rich in narrative, evoking ancestral memory through contemporary streetwear aesthetics.

But this isn’t fashion for fashion’s sake. PaliRoots embeds philanthropy into every order: for every purchase, meals, school supplies, and wardrobes reach Palestinian families by way of their partnership with MECA. Nutrition, dignity, and possibility arrive alongside fabric. To date, they've delivered over 3.6 million meals and raised more than $5.6 million for initiatives such as clean water, winter clothing, and emergency relief.

Reema Al Banna – Reemami

Reema Al Banna, the visionary behind Reemami, launched her label in Dubai in 2009 after leaving behind a graphic design career to pursue fashion full-time armed only with sketches and a fierce drive to redefine Middle Eastern ready‑to‑wear.

Her designs are vivid with symbolism: hand‑drawn motifs, from tatreez embroidery and horses, to tin cans of olive oil, are layered onto structured silhouettes, each garment echoing childhood memories and cultural lineage. In 2016, she won the DDFC/Vogue Fashion Prize, a breakthrough that led to mentorship, broader international distribution, and stockist entries at platforms like BrownsFashion and FarFetch.

In 2022, Reemami debuted at Milan Fashion Week through Emerging Talents Milan, remixing refugee-made patchwork and equestrian motifs into a Palestinian‑feminist readiness garment line.

Al Banna's designs have recently gained even more global attention with Palestinian supermodel Bella Hadid wearing Reemami’s Maqlouba dress to launch her perfume Ôrebella: Eternal Roots, calling it “a piece of art” and praising the label’s deep connection to Palestine.

Yasmeen Mjalli - Nöl Collective

Yasmeen Mjalli is the Palestinian‑American founder of Nöl Collective, a fast-growing fashion brand rooted in craft, ethics, and storytelling. Based in Ramallah after moving from the U.S. in 2017, she unveiled Nöl in 2020 as a redefined version of her earlier feminist label BabyFist, driven now by a full embrace of slow fashion and her responsibility to the makers behind each garment.

The brand was inspired by a vintage photo of a man naturally dyeing yarn in the sea. It was a moment that turned fixation into a mission: to revive vanished textile traditions. “Nöl” means “loom” in Arabic, and for Mjalli it embodies her commitment to preserving and collaborating with artisans across Palestine: tatreez embroiderers, Majdalawi weavers, family-run workshops, women’s cooperatives, all of whom bring lives and histories to each piece.

Her work has caught international attention most notably when Grammy-winning musician Arooj Aftab chose Nöl for her London stagewear. The ensemble, a silk taffeta suit stamped with tatreez and Pakistani print, was a marriage of aesthetics, identity, and solidarity, remade by Mjalli’s studio under the burden of occupation logistics and checkpoint delays.

In Mjalli’s hands, garments are more than clothes. They are survival tools, cultural touchstones, and statements of care. When you wear Nöl, you carry voice, lineage and the loom that holds them together.

Zeid Hijazi

Zeid Hijazi, the Palestinian-Jordanian designer born in Amman, trained at Central Saint Martins and rose to prominence after winning the Debut Talent Prize from Fashion Trust Arabia. That award served both as validation and as a launchpad for a label deeply rooted in memory and political narrative.

Hijazi imagines Palestinian women hacking broadcast frequencies and translating their defiance into cross-stitched symbols like the Key of Hebron, Cypress, and Ears of Corn.

Working with female artisans across Amman and Beirut, particularly through Lebanon’s INAASH, Hijazi brings kinetic life to designs such as the “Moon of Palestine” neckties while affirming the labour and lineage embedded in Palestinian craft.

With bold, exaggerated tailoring, embroidered neckties, tasseled capes, and shoulders built to command space, Hijazi creates work that is architectural and poetic. His fashion does not simply merge cultures but articulates its own language. Each piece resists erasure, archives heritage, and demands visibility.

Hazar Jawabra

Hazar Jawabra, a Palestinian knitwear designer from Umm El Fahem now living in Jerusalem, first learned to knit from her grandmother before developing her practice at Bezalel College of Arts and Design. Her work reimagines knitting as a radical art form, transforming yarn into sculptural statements with oversized sleeves, masks, and cascading textures that verge on performance. Her debut collection Different Skin’s Tones erupted in blinding colour, with chaotic silhouettes that channel both joy and confrontation, reflecting the tensions of identity, expectation, and selfhood.

Jawabra often works without sketches, letting the process unfold intuitively so that each loop carries memory, emotion, and resistance. Her masks and playful forms deliberately disrupt traditional ideas of gender and expression, while her riot of colour insists on Palestinian visibility in the face of erasure. For Jawabra, knitwear is not only craft but protest, archive, and imagination: an insistence that Palestinian creativity cannot be silenced.

Photography by @fadidahabreh