Qasimi Decamps to Milan With Fashion, Art and a Social Message in Tow
MILAN — Hoor Al Qasimi is sure to be making her late twin brother Khalid proud on Friday as she decamps for the first time to Milan from London to unveil Qasimi’s fall 2025 menswear collection as part of the city’s official fashion week schedule.
“We’ve been talking about Milan for a while now, and my brother also was interested in coming to the city,” she said on Zoom a few days before the presentation, from Vienna. “Milan just felt like one of the important hubs of fashion, and its fashion is always very strong,” she said.
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This is not going to be a one-off trip. The lack of a full-fledged London Fashion Week for menswear since 2022 forced the designer, who last season hosted an emotionally charged show in London as part of small showcase the city hosted, to rethink her plans.
A trained and practicing art curator, Al Qasimi has brought some of her background into the brand since taking the creative and business helm in 2019 from her brother who founded it in 2015.
“I’m always collaborating with artists because of my previous/current job as a curator. I work with so many amazing artists from all over the world, and their stories are interesting, there are so many opportunities,” she said of the creative process. “I have a very collaborative spirit when I work, so I’m hoping that people would find resonance with the artists’ works, and maybe with some of the messaging in our work, too,” she said.
For fall, the New Zealand painter Emily Karaka informed some of the collection’s prints and patterns, as well as messaging.
“She is senior artist but also an activist, really working on the land right movements and [specifically] the Maori land right movements and looking at historic treaties,” Al Qasimi explained.
The warm and bold color palette of Al Qasimi’s favorite Karaka painting, titled “He Kakano” and featuring hints of purple and magenta, influenced the fall collection’s chromatic theme, with some prints directly inspired by the artwork and some embroideries taking literal cue from the words and figures appearing in the artist’s oeuvre.
“It was very important with this one painting,” she said, to explore Indigenous land rights, Al Qasimi offered. To this end, she’s following in the footsteps of her late brother’s spotlight of sociopolitical issues through fashion.
The louder designs — printed and heavily embroidered — mingle with more streamlined silhouettes in brown, turmeric and blue that are layered in what Al Qasimi bills as “modular” dressing, with zippers, buttons and chords — which she said “symbolize shifting landscapes and lands kind of being divided and put back together” and allow for personalized styling that she hopes will cater to men and women alike.
Ditching the runway for a presentation format, Al Qasimi secured a semi-industrial space in Milan’s Isola neighborhood set to feature a globe-like light installation aimed at creating a warm and glowing atmosphere, she offered.
Since taking over the brand in 2019, on top of mourning her brother’s death, Al Qasimi has found herself dealing with the aftermath of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. She’s proved resilient, though.
“I think it was good because it gave me time to kind of figure out what was happening in the fashion [system] and getting to know more about it,” she said about the latter roadblock. “I come from contemporary art, and I’m more on the creative side. I struggled sometimes with some business decisions, but we’ve had a lot of long-term clients in the Arab world, and some new buyers, as well, with the shops opening up in Saudi Arabia. So, I think that that’s been pretty good,” she explained.
The Middle East is Qasimi’s strongest market while Asia is picking up, with key accounts in Japan starting to place orders again. Al Qasimi is also trying to address emerging regions by linking up with local showcases, including Lagos Fashion Week. Up next is a guest appearance at Mumbai Fashion Week slated for March.
This is not just a business move, but rather it speaks to Al Qasimi’s community building ambition. In 2022 she established Q Rising, previously known as Qasimi Rising, a fashion incubator aimed at showcasing and promoting emerging designers and creatives throughout Africa.
“I like the idea of being able to bring people together to create something and I felt that, especially after the pandemic, so many people are also struggling and trying to do the same thing. There is such a beautiful energy of having a community and being able to learn from each other, be inspired by each other,” she offered.
“We’re still trying to figure out the best thing to do, but the main thing is that we’re a community that is supporting each other, and I think that’s the thing, a support structure, because I’ve seen the progress and how it’s worked in my 22 years [of experience] in the arts [world]. So many artists that I’ve worked with from the very beginning are in huge collections all over the world now. And there’s something really rewarding and special about that, so I wanted to see how we could do that in fashion as well,” she said.
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