By Layla Al Mazrouei ~
United Arab Emirates awakened to golden glory will be economic fantasy, morning but of fashion, luxury, and brash cultural life. On Dubai Fashion Week technicolor ramps and staid mega-balls of Abu Dhabi skyscrapers, UAE is world cosmopolitan melting pot where future meets past.”.
At the center of their capital cities, the Emirates are undergoing a design revolution—a revolution where fashion and technology and architecture mix with living the now excesses. And what do they call it? An unapologetic, unflinching innovation that’s smoldering so worldwide.
Fashion Forward, Culturally Rooted
UAE eye is an exhausted eye to look for beauty from new to old culture and an eye that has experienced. Flits across Emirati designers’ catwalks in cyber catalogs or flits across shops at Alserkal Avenue, no brainier: the local designers are taking an international not a local picture.
They are pan-regional names like Huda Al Nuaimi and Yara Bin Shakar leading the pan-regional transformation with competitive zeal fueled by real life snapshots of aging adding fresh passion to a fresh pizzazz. They are hiding Emirati fingers and international vogue consciousness in trying to offer an alternative if there is really over-saturation in the international market.
Catwalks like Saturday Abu Dhabi Fashion Week and Arab Fashion Week Dubai are where it’s at nowadays for school-new or new designers, school-old the old guard veteran designers themselves, with green-ness to contend with factory ethics problems. Green-ness on the catwalk is becoming more and more in the minds of new fashion designers as catwalk fodder, recycling, and AI-print manufacturing—green-ness on the catwalk and engineering the consumers’ world products.
Where Buildings Breathe Culture
The UAE buildings themselves are not less magic. The country opted for fantasy and excess of fantasy and excess in one fantasy of urbanity. Burj Khalifa and Cayan Tower are equally the product of the magic of engineering and fantasy imagination.
With form styling as low-key as mud, Emirates are Technology-conform style and architectural legend. Fashionably, TIME Magazine has fashion-rules-worthy titled it on weather fronts, curving form into comfort or indeed virtual communication throbbing in LED-inlays. Fashion-tech Qasimi and many others re-map function topography of form and an attempt at staying in tune with the city mood of centuries.
The designers themselves are employing AI modeling, 3D printing, and smart systems to come up with even more sustainable buildings that are responsive to climatic-, occupancy-occupancy-, and even mood-dependent to a condition as the support is being rendered by light. Hybrid realities like AR experiences of Dubai Design Week are being promised to end-users in so many shapes and forms, guilt trip them.
All. All through inter-disciplinary discussion. Catwalks among architecture behemoths, buildings as artworks to a museum—stretching and curving into intentionality likeness and beauty.
Design as Dialogue: Human and Collaborative
Its being named global design capital is richly warranted in the midst of scale it has been feted for. Dubai Design Week, Art Dubai, and Sharjah Architecture Triennial each have been fertile grounds for cross-sectors and cross-cultural dialogue.
These are cross-over spaces, innovation and heritage, tradition and sustainability. Outsiders and insiders, insiders and outsiders; master makers and new makers. And amidst them all so-called is an intersubjective design vocabulary—multilingual, multi-textured, expressively varied in the internationality of the UAE.
They don’t build beauty in abstractions—fashion sense, intellectual integrity, business are what they build. They’re innovation incubators.
They’re innovation hubs molding minds with panache, evidence of proto-typing prowess is in the marketplace out there, and innovation plans are made.
A Vision Larger Than Beauty
All those loose ends—fashion, technology, fashion—are all driven by the single vision that’s national: to fashion not for beauty but for social impact.
