By Rana Dabbas ~
In Amman’s trendy Jabal Amman arts district, the quiet rustle of cloth and hum of sewing machines waft from the entrance of a light-bright-atelier. Inside, among stacks of linen and velvet embroidery floss as tall as a person, up-and-coming Jordanian fashion designers are making something greater than clothing — they’re forging a trailblazing future for Jordanian fashion that looks back but speaks to the future in bold voice.
From high-street cool street style to haute couture reinterpretations of the traditional thobe, Jordan fashion is wowing the world – and not just the vision. Increasingly, Jordanian fashion designers are dressing with purpose, marrying out-of-the-box creativity, sustainability, heritage, and artistry in each seam. What they’re making is filling regional catwalks, filling European boutique shelves, and trending on social media, but still true to their Jordanian heritage.
Seaming Heritage and Contemporary Times United
A prime example is Fashion Trust Arabia awards finalist Zainab Al-Eqad. Commended for blending Jordanian embroidered heritage work (tatreez) with sleek architectural silhouettes, Al-Eqad’s aesthetic draws directly from the country’s textile — Bedouin imagery or Petra’s Nabatean rock-carved carvings.
“I want women to feel history when they put on my clothes,” she asserts. “But strength, confidence, and identity too.” Her clothes are made by women in rural village workshop premises, who hire them, train them, and give them respect to women who are never part of the fashion system.
It’s one that’s gaining momentum among Jordan’s fashion crowd — not only saving old ways, but rewarding the women and men who work behind them.
Fashion with a Conscience
Sustainability in Jordan is not a fleeting trend; it’s establishing the nation’s new aesthetic vocabulary. Jo Bedu is just one example. With attitude, eco-friendly materials, and pop culture-meets-politics design, Jo Bedu grew from a T-shirt-making business to a cultural phenomenon lifestyle brand throughout the Arab world.
Their mission: Remaining loyal to “Made in Jordan” and saving the earth. Every shirt produced in Jordan on organic cotton and printed through solar-powered warehouses. “Being locally proud and ecologically conscious is not an either/or,” says co-founder Tamer AlMasri.
Others in the fashion community, such as Dana Al-Nasrallah of Nafsika Skourti, are rattling the world with haute couture that dispels mythologies and embodies Arab womanhood in all her rich complexity — audacious, bold, and unapologetic.
Perhaps most astonishing of all Jordan’s fashion rebirth is that it has been feminized to a level never previously observed. That is, from design to business growth, by women in leading to an open as well as innovative creative economy.
Projects like SheFighter and the Jordanian Design Hub are empowering and educating young fashion and design creatives as women, dismantling gender silos and producing a generation of business-astute creatives.
This network has launched fashion companies headed by women like Woven Jordan, which sells Bedouin women’s handmade hand-looms in Al Karak, southern town. Each scarf, each dress, each shawl is a story — of fashion, survival, re-invention.
A Global Market for Local Stories
With rising digital technology and pop-ups from Paris to Dubai, the designers from Jordan are cornering markets all over the world with their designs. The success of the India Fashion Week and so on has built a catwalk – literal and figurative both – for the locals to stroll over the buyers, media, and fashion houses worldwide.
In 2022, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) partnered with Jordan Fashion Week in sustainable fashion promotion, looking specifically at how Jordanian designers are most well-suited to be leaders in ethical fashion — a huge pull for global buyers who want authenticity and transparency.
The Future Is Handmade
Most interesting in the fashion revolution happening in Jordan is how it refuses to substitute one choice for another, the past for the future, domestic for international. Instead, these designers are showing the world that fashion can be simultaneously old and on-the-edge, personal and politicized, hand-crafting-oriented and mass-capable.
And while the fashion world starts to come to terms with sustainability, cultural appropriation, and diversity, Jordan’s indigenous fashion is offering them something completely different: heritage. These brands are not trend-following — they’re dictating the script, stitch by stitch, and hemline by hemline.
The next time you catch sight of a model sashaying down one of Paris’s catwalks or look into a Beirut shop, don’t be so shocked if that beautiful beautiful, hand-embroidered coat shouts it loud and clear: “Made in Jordan.”
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