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MILAN — Hoor Al Qasimi is sure to make her late twin brother Khalid proud on Friday when she heads from London to Milan for the first time to present Qasimi’s fall 2025 men’s collection as part of the city’s official fashion week program.
“We have been talking about Milan for some time, and my brother was also interested in coming to the city,” she said on Zoom from Vienna a few days before the presentation. “Milan just felt like one of the main fashion centers, and its fashion is always very strong,” she said.
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This will not be a one-time trip. The lack of a full-fledged London Fashion Week for menswear since 2022 has forced the designer, who staged an emotionally charged show in London last season as part of a small show in the city, to rethink her plans.
A trained and practicing art curator, Al Qasimi has brought some of her background to the brand since taking over creative and business leadership in 2019 from her brother, who founded it in 2015.
“Due to my previous/current work as a curator, I constantly work with artists. I work with so many great artists from all over the world and their stories are interesting, there are so many possibilities,” she said of the creative process. “I have a very collaborative spirit in my work, so I hope people resonate with the artists’ work and perhaps some of the messages in our work,” she said.
For fall, New Zealand painter Emily Karaka designed some of the collection’s prints and patterns, as well as messages.
“She is a senior artist but also an activist who is really committed to the land rights movements [specifically] the Maori land rights movements and looking at historical treaties,” explained Al Qasimi.
The warm and bold color palette of Al Qasimi’s favorite painting by Karaka titled “He Kakano” and hints of purple and magenta influenced the chromatic theme of the fall collection, with some prints directly inspired by the artwork and some embroidery literally based on the words and figures , which appear in the artist’s oeuvre.
“In this one painting, it was very important,” she said, to explore indigenous land rights, Al Qasimi offered. To this end, she is following in the footsteps of her late brother, who shines a spotlight on socio-political issues through fashion.
The bolder designs – printed and heavily embroidered – mix with more streamlined silhouettes in brown, turmeric and blue, layered in what Al Qasimi calls “modular” clothing with zippers, buttons and drawstrings – which she says are “transformable Landscapes and countries symbolize”. “They are sort of split and put back together,” allowing for individual styling that she hopes will suit men and women alike.
Abandoning the catwalk in favor of a presentation format, Al Qasimi secured a semi-industrial space in Milan’s Isola district to display a spherical light installation designed to create a warm and luminous atmosphere, she offered.
Since taking over the brand in 2019, Al Qasimi has not only mourned the death of her brother, but has also had to deal with the fallout from Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, she has proven resilient.
“I think it was good because it gave me time to find out what was happening in fashion [system] and learn more about it,” she said of the latter hurdle. “I come from contemporary art and am more creative. Sometimes I found some business decisions difficult, but we had many long-standing customers in the Arab world and also some new buyers as the stores opened in Saudi Arabia. I think that was pretty good,” she explained.
The Middle East is Qasimi’s strongest market, while Asia is picking up and major customers in Japan are placing orders again. Al Qasimi is also trying to target emerging regions by networking with local showcases, including Lagos Fashion Week. Next up is a guest appearance at Mumbai Fashion Week in March.
This is not just a business move, but rather reflects Al Qasimi’s community-building ambitions. In 2022, she founded Q Rising, formerly known as Qasimi Rising, a fashion incubator with the aim of showcasing and nurturing emerging designers and creatives across Africa.
“I like the idea of bringing people together to create something and I felt like, especially after the pandemic, so many people are also struggling and trying to do the same. It’s such a beautiful energy to have a community and to be able to learn from each other and inspire each other,” she said.
“We’re still trying to figure out what’s best, but the most important thing is that we’re a community that supports each other and I think that’s the right thing to do, a support structure because I’ve seen the progress and how it has worked in my 22 years [of experience] in the arts [world]. So many artists that I worked with from the beginning are now in huge collections around the world. And there’s something really rewarding and special about that, so I wanted to see how we could translate that into fashion too,” she said.
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