De.Fash.Struction

Telling Stories Through Fashion, Curated By Khulood Thani.

The designers in De.Fash.Struction explore ways of documenting the United Arab Emirates’ rich cultural heritage through the medium of contemporary fashion. They employ the techniques of deconstruction in their newly commissioned projects for this exhibition. 

The commissioned designers document the country’s story through a detailed process of research. They took inspiration from features of the local environment such as the coastline, as well as native agricultural methods, the desert way of life, indigenous architecture and Emirati dress codes and cuisine. 

The designers also researched craft skills, highly prized in the UAE; these include talli, safeefa and sadu. They also examined traditional cultural practices including fishing, sailing, pearling, falconry, the cultivation of date palm trees and horse and camel racing. 

The exhibited designs take these cultural narratives as source material using the deconstruction technique. Deconstruction in fashion implies an undoing of the structure of a garment, a refusal to ‘finish’ it. It suggests working with subtractions or displacements and a rethinking of the function and meaning of the garment itself, which might even appear to be coming apart. Deconstruction techniques enable a dialogue with the past that allows designers to imagine new futures. A recurring motif of deconstruction fashion is the reversal of the relation between the body and the garment and the use of humble or recycled materials. It challenges the relationship between memory and modernity, the enduring and the ephemeral. Garments call attention to the mechanics of their production which in turn becomes a process of analytic creation. 

The exhibition includes womenswear, menswear, abayas, jewellery, leather goods, accessories, shoes, bags, textile design and installation. Documentation of the  designers’ research and design process will also be shown. De.Fash.Struction will feature the work of emerging and established designers based in the UAE, the Gulf region and beyond. 

Participating Designers: 

Jewellery/ Accessories 

Talin Hazbar 

Alia Bin Omair 

Amal Haliq 

Bahar Al Bahar 

Nadine Kanso 

Mirjam Hiller 

YO_CY KALO 

Textile 

Alia Dawood 

Khalid Shafar 

Faissal El Malak 

Fashion/ RTW 

Tahir Sultan 

Ahmad Alanzi 

oe-o 

Ayah Al Bitar 

Pose/ Arazzi 

Fatema Fardan 

Katya  Kovtunovich 

Bidwa 

Tina Luther 

Tijana Mladenovic 

Fashion Photography

Saeed Khalifa