YUNG: The Heatwave Issue

THIS IS YUNG

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THIS IS YUNG

02-XX

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[01] EDITOR'S LETTER

06

[09] CARRIED AWAY

100-112

[02] EDITOR'S PICK

07

[10] 180 YEARS OF LOEWE

113-120

08

[11] ISSUE INDEX

121

[12] SOLE SEARCHING: WHAT JADEN SMITH FOUND AT CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

122-127 128-129 130-133

[03] MASTHEAD [04] COVERS

09

[05] CONTRIBUTORS

10-11

[06] THE MOOD

12-33

[13] SOUND ↘ LINA MAKOUL

[07] ILLUSTRATED

34-49

↘ THE ARABIC SOUND OF HOUSE

134-139

50-51

↘ THE RETURN OF A LEGEND: B018 IS BACK IN BEIRUT

140-145

[08] COVER STORIES ↘ SALMA ABU DEIF ON FIGURING OUT WHO SHE IS ↘ SANDY BELLA ON BECOMING HER OWN MEASURE

52-67

68-83

↘ SERENA ABOU SEFYAN OPENS MORE THAN A SHOW 84-99

[00]

CONTENTS

[14] THE HEATWAVE 146-147 ↘ BVLGARI ENTERS THE BIENNALE WITH BOOKS, FIRE & PATRONAGE 148-153

[15] YUNG ESCAPES ↘ THE ANTI-EURO SUMMER GUIDE

220 - 223

↘ THE SUMMER OF SECOND STARTS

154-161

↘ AMSTERDAM RE-IMAGINED THROUGH ANANTARA

224- 227

↘ WELCOME TO HOUSE OF HADER

162-165

↘ MARIOLINO: MEMORIES OF THE SEA

228 - 231

↘ THE STUDIO IN THE SUITCASE

166-171

[16] ISSUE INDEX SOLUTION 232

↘ RIDING THE UNEXPECTED

172-177

↘ THE VENICE BIENNALE OPENS IN KOYO KOUOH’S KEY 178-183 ↘ SUMMER READS THAT REFUSE ESCAPISM 184-187 ↘ BOTTLED DESIRE

188-195

↘ PIAGET’S STUNNING FINAL CHAPTER OF EXTRALEGANZA

196-201

↘ THE GOLDEN HOUR

202 - 213

↘ BETWEEN WORLDS

214 - 217

218 - 219

THIS IS YUNG

The Last Chapter Before September

06-07

Every summer has a way of feeling like the final chapter of a book you never want to end.

The pages turn slower. The days stretch longer. The colours become brighter, richer, louder. And somewhere between departure and arrival, between one city and the next, you find yourself reflecting on everything that brought you here.

As I write this letter, I am on a flight home from Monte Carlo, still carrying with me the energy of Piaget’s Colours of Extraleganza. A celebration of colour, elegance, boldness and creativity that felt less like a jewellery presentation and more like a reminder that life is meant to be lived vividly. Meeting Stéphanie Sivrière, Piaget’s Creative Director, and hearing how she continues to draw inspiration from the Maison’s archives, reinforced something I have always believed: the future belongs to those who never stop looking back with curiosity.

Just a few weeks earlier, Bvlgari brought us to the Venice Biennale as the exhibition's exclusive partner. This year’s edition, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, stood as a powerful tribute to her vision and legacy. We sat down with Matteo Morbidi, Managing Director of Fondazione Bvlgari, and explored the foundation’s first collateral event at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, where the works of Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda brought new conversations into one of Venice’s most historic spaces. Walking through Venice, surrounded by ideas, stories and creativity from every corner of the world, I was reminded that art remains one of the few truly universal languages.

Perhaps that is why this issue feels particularly special.

EDITOR'S LETTER

On our covers, we celebrate three women who are each shaping their own path. Salma Abu Deif opens up about motherhood, acting and learning to protect what matters most while navigating life in the spotlight. Sandy Bella reflects on growth, ambition and her starring role in 7 Dogs, a film that arrives at a defining moment in her career and signals the beginning of an exciting new chapter. And Serena Abou Sefyan makes history as the first Lebanese-Armenian model to open an international fashion show, representing a new generation of talent carrying our region onto the global stage.

Elsewhere in the issue, Lina Makoul reflects on identity, freedom and finding her voice on her own terms. We step inside the world of House of Hader, where Lebanese creative Ghady Hader thrives in a grey area where fashion label, emotional universe, installation art, and archive collide. Cherien Dabis reminds us that growth rarely follows a perfect timeline, while artists, musicians and creatives from across the region continue to redefine culture through their work, their stories and their perspective.

What connects all of them isn’t fame, success or recognition.

It’s movement.

The willingness to evolve. To take risks.

To begin again. To trust that the next chapter might be even better than the last.

And maybe that’s the feeling I keep coming back to this summer.

The world feels heavy at times, uncertain at others. Yet everywhere I look, I see a generation creating, building, dreaming and pushing forward anyway. They’re launching brands, making films, creating music, opening doors and refusing to be defined by geography, expectations or tradition.

For YUNG, this issue is a celebration of that energy.

Of colour. Of creativity. Of possibility.

September is already on the horizon, bringing new ideas, new voices and new stories waiting to be told. But before we turn the page, I hope this issue reminds you to stay curious, stay ambitious and stay open to wherever life takes you next.

After all, the best stories are never really endings.

They’re simply the beginning of a new chapter.

YUNG FOUNDER & EDITOR IN CHIEF

[EDITOR'S PICK] suitcase, horizon aluminum, LOUIS VUITTON

THIS IS YUNG

08-09

MASTHEAD/COVERS

founder and editor in chief SANDRA YEGHIAZARIAN creative director SAIF HIDAYAH managing editor NADINE KAHIL senior editor LOUIS PARKS creative content manager MAYA MAGED senior producer LAMIS JOUDAH junior art director MALAK AYMAN HOSSNY

SUBMISSIONS AND INQUIRIES hello@thisisyung.com PRINTING AL GHURAIR PRINTING AND PUBLISHING LLC PUBLISHED BY THIS IS YUNG LLC Sharjah Media City hello@thisisyung.com www.thisisyung.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without permission from the publishers. YUNG Magazine welcomes new contributors but can assume no responsibility for unsolicited photographs or illustrations. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owners of the images and text in this issue.

The Heatwave Issue

Sandy Bella

photography GREG ADAMSKI styling AHMED RASHWAN

call it power

photography JACK CHIPPER styling IGNACIO DE TIEDRA

photography GREG ADAMSKI styling POLINA SHABELNIKOVA

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CONTRIBUTORS

AGNES ROSENBECH / A MOHAMED / ANGELICA W / CHIARA MANNARINO / C MILLER / EMILY WHITE / FAY / HARRY LANGFORD / H IGNACIO DE TIEDRA / IVAN MASKALL / JOHN MOURAT ADAMSKI / LILLY GOUME MARIANA BAIÃO SANTOS / MARI KUNO / MAXIM SHANAB / MICHAEL KON / NATSU TOMONAGA / N JALLAD / POLINA SHABEL SAFIYAH CASSIM / SEBA STEWART / SVEA GREICHG / TILLY LA BELLE YENG

AHMED RASHWAN / ALI WOLANSKA / CHARLIE HALL CHLOE YATES / DOUGLAS YE BLUFF / GREG ADAMSKI HIROSHI MATSUSHITA / N KUZ / JACK CHIPPER / JOE TIS / JULIA RADA / KLAUDIA ET / MAI EL MOKADEM / / MALAK AYMAN HOSSNY MILIAN MCKAY / MENNA NOV / MOHAMMED JAZIM NYARACH AYUEL / OMAIA LNIKOVA / RIHA MEHINDI ASTIAN ISKANDER / SHAN GAUER / TARIK BENNAFLA GO / YASMINA F. BITAR

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THE MOOD

THE MOOD

words OMAIA JALLAD

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THE SYRIAN ARTIST GLITCHING REALITIES

THE MOOD

Based between London and Dubai, Syrian Your work constantly shifts between artist Sara Naim works across photogphotography, painting, sculpraphy, sculpture, painting, and video. Her ture, and video, almost refusing practice examines how language, symto stay in one form. Have you bols, and ideology shape our sense of always been interested in self and our understanding of the world. breaking boundaries creatively?

Through technological glitches, magniI’m a bit of a medium monkey. I don’t fication, and shifts in scale, she explores feel restrained by using one particular the limits of representation and the ways medium to say something. They all have intuition exceeds language. Informed by their own language, and I enjoy adapting her long separation from Syria, her work them to mine. investigates tensions between distance and intimacy, often through pixilation and abstraction. Natural forms, particularly A lot of your work explores the flowers, connect personal ancestry to idea that the closer we get to wider geopolitical conditions, challengsomething, the less clearly we ing notions of fixed political and bodily actually see it. What first drew boundaries. you to that tension between

intimacy and abstraction?

I wasn’t able to go back to Syria for the last 15 years, so during that absence I romanticised Damascus - the smell of jasmine in the streets, its dry summer heat, the flavour of watermelon and peach. I realised these idealised memories were probably far from reality, in the same way images and thoughts can slowly replace lived experience until we get lost in their abstraction.

How has this distance shaped the emotional language of your work?

Photo courtesy of talent.

I’m a bit contradictory because although I’m very sentimental about Syria, I also try to describe division as a construct. The exclusivity that comes from belonging is the same mechanism that excludes others from entering it. As the distance from Syria increases, so does its sentimental value. Sentimentality, culture, and identity are all wrapped up in division - I’m still trying to understand that negotiation.

Glitches, distortion, pixilation; things normally seen as flaws, become strangely emotional in your practice. What attracts you to visual “errors” as a form of communication?

Initially, I wanted to talk about our relationship to the body as something strangely foreign, despite carrying it with us everywhere. The glitch began as a technical error while photographing my skin through a scanning electron microscope, but it soon became an analogy for the fractured communication between the internal and external world. I’m interested in emotional manifestations penetrating the skin - blushing when embarrassed or sweating when nervous. These feel like brief slips where the body involuntarily reveals something internal, which I explored in earlier works.

Flowers and organic forms appear repeatedly throughout your work, but they never feel decorative. What do those natural motifs represent for you?

Biological forms like flora and skin constantly transgress borders through pollination and shedding. I use plants to imagine a more collective way of existing, where movement across borders is natural rather than controlled. They shift the perspective away from individuality and toward cohabitation. We’re born into inherited frameworks for understanding ourselves and the world, and my work tries to deconstruct them. Different ways of seeing are always available to us, but we often solidify the structures around ourselves and forget that we were the ones who built them in the first place.

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THE MOOD

Sara Farha

Datecrete Studio & Lab is rethinking what buildings can be made from, starting with something as overlooked as a date pit.

Co-founded by Sara Farha and Khaled Shalkha, the interdisciplinary studio merges material science, design, and environmental research to create sustainable construction materials rooted in the MENA region. Their signature innovation transforms discarded date seeds into a high-performance cementitious composite, bridging ancient building knowledge with contemporary experimentation.

How do your different backgrounds in urban planning, material research, and chemical engineering complement one another creatively?

We’ve always believed that meaningful work usually happens at the overlap between seemingly unrelated fields. Beyond our formal backgrounds, we’re also deeply influenced by art, film, music, and visual culture. This is foundational to who we are as people.

A lot of ideas come from reconnecting things that have become unnecessarily siloed. In our case, food systems and construction had stopped speaking to one another; a separation reinforced by how academia is structured. Datecrete really began through intuition first, through educated guesses and connecting distant points of research that didn’t initially seem related, followed by the scientific validation.

Photography by Abrar Kebaili.

&Khaled Shalkha Innovating From Fruit to Foundation

What conversations are you hoping Datecrete sparks around value, waste, and materiality?

Probably the importance of interdisciplinary thinking and what we’d call pragmatic idealism. We try to balance optimism with critical analysis and we’re not interested in romanticizing waste or the past for aesthetic reasons alone. We’re more interested in studying systems carefully, understanding their failures and successes, and extracting usable lessons to balance imagination and practicality, which is where we feel our real strength lies.

How important was it for Datecrete What did your journey teach you to feel regionally rooted? about patience and innovation?

It was important, but not in a nostalgic or performative way. We weren’t interested in creating the optics of rootedness or romanticizing the past. What interested us was understanding the region’s broader cementitious history critically: Why were certain historical binder systems abandoned so quickly after industrialization?

Why couldn’t they compete with Portland cement at scale? Those questions became more interesting to us than simply reproducing old techniques. Datecrete is less about returning backward and more about reconnecting interrupted lines of material knowledge, while allowing industries like food and construction to speak to each other again.

All images courtesy of Datecrete Studio & Lab.

Our process may begin experimentally, but there’s always equal emphasis on validation, on making and on implementation.

Experimentation without testing eventually becomes a temporary project. What the research taught us most is that innovation often comes from stepping outside your disciplinary comfort zone. A lot of answers remain invisible if you ignore the overlap between different fields of study.

Patience is necessary because meaningful material development is rarely linear, you test, fail, recalibrate, and slowly begin understanding the logic of the material rather than imposing assumptions onto it.

Datecrete challenges the idea that high-performance materials must feel industrial or detached from nature. Do you believe the future of design lies in reconnecting technology with organic materials?

We do, but carefully. Organic materials alone are not automatically sustainable, and technology alone is not inherently harmful. A healthy future probably lies in dissolving this false separation between technological advancement and ecological intelligence. For us, the question is about building material systems that are regionally intelligent, resource-conscious, and scientifically rigorous while retaining warmth, an aromatic dimension, tactility, and emotional resonance.

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THE MOOD

Photography by Ali Imam.

How has your relationship to Sudanese culture evolved through your work over time?

Creating Archives of Love & Memories

For a while, I shied away from directly referencing my Sudanese identity in my work. Not because I was embarrassed but rather because I was afraid of having my work put in a box or my identity overshadowing my actual artwork and practice. This changed dramatically when the current war first broke out in Sudan in 2023. I felt a sense of urgency to represent this part of my identity in my artwork because I felt like if I didn’t it would continue to go ignored and worse, erased. My art practice was one of the few ways I could say to the world that we are Sudanese and we are here. We exist.

Sarah Elawad’s art feels like flipping through treasured memories; intimate, colourful, and emotionally charged. Working across Your work is in collections like the Watson Library at The collage, textiles, garments, printmaking, publishing, video, and MET and the British Library through your experimeninstallation, she builds visual worlds where softness and storytal publishing practice. What does this mean to you? telling become forms of resistance. Elawad gained international I am so grateful to have my work in these places and appreciated recognition through exhibitions in New York, Doha, Amsterdam, by these institutions but I think it’s important to note that that is and Shanghai. She also co-manages the experimental publishless relevant to me than someone who relates directly with the ing project Water With Water, with artist books held in collections work and feels seen or like they have found a sense of hope or at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Watson Library, The British like someone is giving them a hug. If my work being in these instiLibrary, and Asia Art Archive. tutions means it reaches more people and has the chance to make them feel anything at all, then that is what I would be most You work in print, textiles, garments, installations, video, grateful to them for.

and collage. What attracts you to working across so many mediums instead of limiting yourself to one form?

I think form is important but it is not the most important part of an artwork, what it's trying to say is much more important. I am so intrigued by the concept that there are many different ways you can say the same or similar things. All of my artwork is connected by the throughline that I made and they are based on reactions or experiences that led me to make them, but the way that comes across can be different whilst being very much the same.

How do you balance personal vulnerability with storytelling in your practice?

I strongly believe that deeply personal work will always be relevant to larger audiences. None of our experiences happen in a vacuum. In the beginning a lot of my work was just based on my own experiences and I slowly began to find that as people interacted with the work a lot of them also related to it.

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20-21

Hayfa Algwaiz The Multi-Hyphenate Creating Spaces That Remember

THE MOOD

Saudi artist and architect Hayfa Algwaiz creates paintings that feel like suspended memories; intimate, atmospheric, and deeply rooted in the psychology of space. Based in Riyadh, her work blurs the line between architecture and painting, transforming domestic interiors, draped fabrics, and ornamental details into quiet studies of identity, womanhood, and belonging. Algwaiz captures moments that feel both deeply personal and universally familiar; paused conversations, empty rooms, traces of presence rather than direct portraits.

What first drew you toward painting, and when did you realise it was something you wanted to pursue seriously?

My entry point into architecture was drawing – the way it forces you to draft ideas in 2D and then translate them into 3D. I was always drawn to the render's immediacy as a way to communicate complex forms and ideas through a flat image. After graduating and working at different architecture studios, I found myself feeling like an avatar for someone else’s thoughts and ideas. Naturally, I felt the need to render my own story with my own hands at a much slower pace.

What usually sparks a painting for you; a place, an emotion, a visual moment, or something else entirely?

Time and place are everything in my practice. I have to be physically present and immersed in a space for a prolonged period of time for inspiration to hit. It’s an intuitive process that requires paying attention to things like repetition, patterns, colours and activities.

There’s always an element of searching for what creates context.

Much of your work focuses on interiors and domestic Saudi spaces. What fascinates you about the quiet psychology of the home?

I used to work at a couple of residential architectural firms in San Francisco. You learn so much about a person through their house. So every time I came home to visit my family in Riyadh, I started noticing the details that informed the differences in the way we lived – our relationship to one another, where we gather or create space for ourselves and how the space itself facilitates our interactions.

Your paintings often feel suspended between presence and absence — spaces without figures, draped fabrics without bodies, traces of people rather than people themselves. What draws you to that tension?

The absence of people in my work is a way of navigating privacy in the public eye. I’m often sharing very intimate moments and stories, and I would hate to strip my subjects of their right to privacy. So things like redaction, absence, scale, partial visibility and abstraction become tools for limiting access to the inner world. Here, access is granted and not always a given.

Your paintings capture Saudi in a way that feels both deeply personal and subtly transformative; documenting spaces that are changing culturally and architecturally. Do you see your work as a form of archiving?

I used to think of my work as archiving, but I recently came across a distinction between archiving, documenting and historicizing – and I'm not sure my work fits neatly into any of those. For now, it feels more like a practice of noticing and making connections.

Whether it becomes an archive or something else entirely, time will tell.

Photography by Nana Ampofo.

22-23

Lara Khoury

THE MOOD

Healing Through Fashion Lara Khoury has never designed clothes simply to dress the body; she designs to liberate it. Since launching LARAKHOURY in Beirut, the multidisciplinary creative has built a world where fashion becomes emotional architecture: fluid, sculptural, imperfect, and deeply human. Trained between Beirut and Paris at ESMOD, and shaped by early experiences with Rabih Keyrouz and Elie Saab, Khoury developed a visual language rooted in movement, softness, and rebellion against restrictive ideas of beauty, femininity, and identity.

Following the Lebanese revolution, the Beirut explosion, and her personal journey through cancer, her work evolved into something even more intimate; exploring healing, resilience, memory, and survival.

Photography by Les Indisciplines.

THIS IS YUNG

carries an invisible yet You founded LARAKHOURY with a The Aala Daou El Baher collection The project profound connection with vision rooted in freedom, idenfeels deeply personal, rooted in Aimee Daou, a Lebanese tity, and self-expression. What ideas of healing, memory, and woman who died of cancer, first pushed you toward crethe sea as a space of refuge. and someone you never met. ating your own world through What first sparked the emoHow did that emotional confashion? tional foundation behind it? nection shape the direction of From my very first years as a designer, and The emotional foundation of this work the collection? almost without realising it, I always carried began during my journey through

I also carried that rebellion into my personal life. When I shaved my head at 18, I did it purely for the joy of it, for the freedom and the style. But the reactions around me were intense. Some people thought I was sick, while others believed that a woman’s beauty exists in her hair, which suddenly made me “ugly” according to societal standards. Since then, my work has always been about breaking these norms and empowering people to exist as they choose to be — freely, comfortably, unapologetically.

cancer. During that period, the sea quietly became my refuge. I would leave the hospital and go directly to the shore, simply to sit facing the horizon. It became a place where I could breathe again, where I could release fear, grief, and uncertainty.

The sea gave me a sense of continuity at a moment when life suddenly felt fragile.

Looking at something so vast and eternal reminded me that there was still beauty, movement, and life beyond what I was experiencing physically.

Aimee lived in a beautiful family house built directly by the sea in Batroun. The presence of the sea there is overwhelming — you feel it from every corner of the house. It is part of the rhythm of daily life, almost like another living presence within the space. The moment I entered her home, I immediately understood that the sea must have been part of her healing journey too. I felt, instinctively, that it must have held her the same way it held me throughout my own experience.

What moved me deeply was also her presence within the house itself. Her photographs were everywhere, looking back at me, smiling. Even though we had never met, I felt an undeniable emotional connection to her.

That feeling slowly began shaping the collection. It transformed the work into something beyond fashion, into a dialogue between two stories connected by the same horizon, the same water, and the same search for light.

Photography by Omar Gabriel.

a rebellious spirit. It was present in the way I created, in the way I approached tailoring, and in the way I refused to follow rules simply because they existed.

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Dina Kamal

THE MOOD

Jewellery Built Like Armour

Founded by architect Dina Kamal, DINAKAMAL exists in the space between architecture, jewellery, and emotional design. Defined by dualities; softness and strength, masculinity and femininity, sensuality and restraint; the brand transforms minimal forms into powerful objects of presence. Drawing from brutalism, mythology, ancient armour, and architectural structures, Kamal approaches jewellery with the precision of an architect, where proportion, balance, and emotional impact carry equal weight.

Her signature “beige gold,” a muted raw 18K white gold, reflects the quiet confidence at the core of the brand: subtle yet deeply intentional.

You were an architect before launching DINAKAMAL, did jewellery feel like a new language or architecture on You’ve spoken about being fascinated by construction a smaller scale? pits, grids, and excavated spaces. What is it about Jewellery never felt separate from architecture to me. It was always those raw architectural moments that emotionally an extension of the same way of thinking; proportion, structure, inspires you?

emotion, and how design can transform us. Architecture shapes I’ve always been drawn to moments where the familiar ground how we move and transform through space, while jewellery opens up and reveals another layer beneath it. Construction pits, shapes how we carry ourselves within it. The scale changed, but foundations, grids, manholes, they all disrupt our usual sense of the core question remained the same: how can form alter pres- scale and context. They create a brief moment where proportion ence, feeling, and perception? shifts, and something ordinary becomes fascinating again. I think I’m deeply inspired by anything that changes how we perceive ourselves in relation to space.

All images courtesy of DINAKAMAL.

Jewellery is usually thought of as decorative, but your pieces often feel closer to objects of protection or even armour. What interests you about that relationship between jewellery and power?

Jewellery has historically never been purely decorative. It has signified protection, identity, status, ritual, power. That psychological role really interests me. I love the idea that a piece can feel like something to ground yourself, protect yourself, or shift your state of mind. Almost like a modern form of armour; subtle, personal, but powerful.

A lot of your designs seem to alter the wearer’s awareness of their own body; posture, movement, presence. Is designing for the body psychologically different from designing for a building?

Your work often references modernism and brutalism, Designing for the body is more intimate because even the smallest but the pieces still feel sensual and deeply personal shift can affect posture, movement, and self-awareness immerather than rigid. How do you balance structure with diately. But in essence, architecture and jewellery are asking me emotion? the same thing: how does form affect emotion? They both shape For me, structure without emotion can feel cold, and emotion without structure can feel unresolved. I’m always searching for tension and balance, between softness and strength, sensuality and restraint, ancient and futuristic. I’m less interested in over-designing and more interested in finding the precise point where a form feels emotionally charged, yet effortless.

our experiences externally and internally. Both have the power to transform us.

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ALTurk Twins Duaa & Nedaa ALTurk Twin Frequencies from Saudi

ALTurkTwins, Duaa and Nedaa ALTurk, have built a distinctive sonic world where deep house, electronic production, and traditional Arabic instrumentation collide. What began as spontaneous jam sessions between Duaa’s DJ sets and Nedaa’s oud improvisations has evolved into one of the Kingdom’s most exciting emerging musical projects. Their breakthrough sound bridges heritage and futurism, transforming the oud from a traditional instrument into something entirely contemporary. The sisters grew up immersed in music, drawing inspiration not from one genre or artist but from emotion itself. Today, their hypnotic productions and live performances have positioned them at the forefront of Saudi Arabia’s rapidly evolving music scene.

Photography by Zeyad Medhat.

THE MOOD

What first pulled both of you toward electronic music, and do you remember the moment you realised this could become something serious?

We were naturally drawn toward electronic music because we have always been inspired by sounds that feel modern, immersive, and emotionally evolving with the time we live in. We love genres that feel creative, unique, and slightly unexpected, and electronic music has this freedom to explore that space naturally. The moment it started to feel serious was when we created our first track, “Signs From God.” That was the moment we both felt that this was more than an experiment - it felt like the beginning of the world of sound we wanted to build through ALTurkTwins.

Before ALTurkTwins, what was your relationship to music growing up?

We grew up in Taif for around 17 years, and music was always a huge part of our daily life. We spent most of our time listening to a lot of different kinds of music.

For us, it was never about one specific artist or genre.

It was always about the feeling that guides us creatively. Blending traditional instruments like the oud with electronic music feels like creating a new magical world where heritage and modern energy exist together naturally.

Your music blends house and electronic production with subtle Middle Eastern influences. Was that something you intended from the start, or did it happen over time?

In the beginning, Duaa was practicing DJing on her own, while I walked into the room holding the oud and wanted to practice with her, playing over different beats, keys, and rhythms. We started improvising together over a few tracks, and everything felt surprisingly natural from the first moment. There was already a strong understanding and harmony between us creatively, so the fusion happened very organically over time. At the same time, it also became intentional because we realised how emotionally unique that sound felt to us.

If you had to describe the world of ALTurkTwins in one perfect scene, what would it look like?

Hidden magical frequencies and deep vibrations moving through people with light and power, hearts and minds sparked, while the oud leads the entire journey emotionally - creating a space where everyone feels hypnotised by the moment, free, deeply connected, and emotionally awakened without needing to say anything. Music that feeds the soul.

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Sarah Ben Romdane

KAÏA & A Taste of Home

THE MOOD

Sarah Ben Romdane isn’t just building an olive oil brand; she’s rebuilding a relationship to land, memory, and identity. Born in Paris to a Tunisian father and Syrian mother, and raised between France and London, the founder of KAÏA returned to her family’s fifth-generation olive estate in Mahdia during the pandemic; a decision that completely reshaped the course of her life. What began as a personal reconnection soon evolved into a larger mission: creating a new narrative around Tunisian olive oil, one rooted in visibility, heritage, and political intention.

Photography by Bechir Zayene.

You've described the summer of Before founding KAÏA, you worked What does reviving your family's 2020 as a turning point in your in journalism. Did storytelling legacy mean to you personally? relationship to Tunisia and to naturally evolve into building a It gives me chills every time. My third yourself. What shifted for you brand, or did launching KAÏA great-grandfather was exporting olive during that period? feel like a complete leap into the oil from Mahdia to the United States in I had spent months of lockdown alone unknown? the 19th century, under a Tunisian family in Paris feeling genuinely low, disori- Both. The storytelling part felt completely ented, disconnected. As soon as borders natural. I've always been driven by a opened, I booked a ticket to Tunisia and desire to tell stories about my people and what was meant to be three weeks our multiple identities, and KAÏA gave me turned into six months. Growing up in a subject I was completely obsessed Europe, you're conditioned to orient your- with. Coming from politics and journalism, self outward: Europe, the USA, maybe I knew my real skills lived in communicathe Gulf. Tunisia is the place you're from, tion and cultural translation, not finance. not the place you're going. But being in There's such a hunger for this kind of repMahdia, where I've spent every summer resentation. But I always wanted to make since I was born, did something unex- sure the storytelling was never divorced pected. I realised I'd been carrying a deep, from the actual politics of the place. I'm almost spiritual connection to that place very conscious of not wanting to exploit my whole life, that this is a place that heals the very thing I'm trying to protect. me, brings me joy and creativity, and is the heart of my politics.

name, winning prizes. Then political shifts, emigration, life, the legacy went quiet. As the sixth generation, I've revived what they started, but with my own vision, my own tools, my own politics. It feels like both an act of love and an act of repair.

Do you think reconnecting with land and tradition has become a political act?

For me it always has been. We live in a world where everything is commodified, optimised, and we are all divorced from our roots and our authenticity. None of that inspires me, it's brutal, extractive, and creates real oppression. Going back to the land is about imagining another world.

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Fadi Yachoui

THE MOOD

The Visionary Behind Atelier L’inconnu Architect and designer Fadi Yachoui creates objects that feel more like emotional landscapes than furniture. Shaped by Beirut, refined through Paris and Milan, and influenced by figures like Bernard Khoury and Piero Lissoni, his work exists between architecture, sculpture, and memory. Through Atelier L’inconnu “The Unknown Workshop” Yachoui approaches design as a collective, sensory experience rather than a signature style.

Courtesy of talent.

Atelier L’inconnu translates to “The Unknown Workshop.” What inspired the name, and why was it important for you to create a collective identity?

The name came from an attraction toward the unknown as a creative condition — the idea that the most meaningful work often emerges from uncertainty, experimentation, and discovery rather than certainty. “L’inconnu” represents a space of openness, where work can evolve freely without being confined by expectation or a predetermined identity.

Creating a collective identity was also very important to me because I never saw design as an isolated act. Every project is shaped through exchanges, with artisans, collaborators, materials, places, and lived experiences.

The atelier describes design as something to be “experienced rather than signed.” What does that philosophy mean to you personally?

For me, design should first create a feeling before it communicates authorship.

We live in a time where visibility and recognition often become central, but I have always been more interested in what remains emotionally with someone after encountering a piece or a space. The work should not exist simply to be recognized; it should exist to be experienced.

That philosophy also comes from the belief that design is relational. A piece only fully exists once someone engages with it, through touch, presence, memory, or interaction. In that sense, the experience becomes more important than the signature itself.

Photography by Walid Rashid.

Do you naturally approach furniture and objects as emotional experiences rather than simply practical forms?

Yes, very naturally. Function is essential, but it is never enough on its own.

I’m interested in how objects can hold emotion, memory, and presence. A chair, a bench, or a table can become more than a utilitarian object; it can become a space for waiting, intimacy, confrontation, or reflection.

Many of my works begin from an emotional impulse rather than from function itself. Form and material then become ways of giving that emotion a body.

I think this is why the pieces often sit somewhere between object and sculpture. They are functional and comfortable, but they also carry a narrative or psychological dimension.

In today’s increasingly digital and fast-paced world, why do you think preserving the human touch in design is so important?

Because the human hand carries memory. There is a certain irregularity, warmth, and emotional presence in handcrafted work that cannot be replicated industrially. The trace of time, gesture, and labour becomes embedded within the object itself.

Working with artisans in Lebanon is also about preservation through evolution. Many traditional techniques are increasingly fragile, and I believe contemporary design has a responsibility not simply to preserve them nostalgically, but to reinterpret them in ways that allow them to continue living.

What I find particularly moving is when artisans themselves become challenged and excited by new possibilities. When someone who has woven for decades tells me they have never approached the material this way before, it becomes a meaningful exchange between heritage and experimentation.

Courtesy of talent.

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Ahmed Chrediy

THE MOOD

Intimacy Through Photography Photographer and director Ahmed Chrediy captures the kind of moments most people overlook; the pauses between conversations, the stillness after movement, the quiet shift in someone’s expression when they stop performing. Based in London and Berlin, his work moves between photography and film with a deeply human sensitivity. Rooted in questions of belonging, memory, and identity, Chrediy’s visual language is less about perfection and more about feeling; faded tones, soft light, grain, texture, and honesty.

Courtesy of talent.

What’s your earliest memory of holding a camera, and when did image-making stop feeling like documentation and start feeling personal?

It started with my mum. When we were younger, she would always record us on her VHS camera wherever we travelled. She’d sit my sisters and me down, and we’d watch the footage together on an old TV, the kind where you had to plug in the AV cables and sometimes hit the side just to get the image to work.

Those recordings stayed with me. Over time, I realised I wasn’t just watching family memories, I was trying to understand my place within them. Somewhere along the way, documentation became something closer to confession, which I explored in my latest personal project, “Where Do I Belong”, a reflection on exploring my roots, family displacement, and living in the in-between.

In your work, the colours, tones, and textures feel immediately recognisable as yours.

How did you develop that visual language?

I would say it came naturally over time through a lot of trial and error, especially by retouching my own images until I felt genuinely satisfied with the outcome. At a certain point, I stopped colour grading to please clients and started doing it to satisfy myself instead. That shift is difficult, being willing to lose clients because they don’t align with your look and feel, but it’s necessary. In the end, the work has to be for you. Since then, I’ve become more interested in how an image feels rather than how perfect it looks, and like everything in life, it’s still a work in progress.

You move between still imagery and directing films. What does motion allow you to express that a photograph can’t?

I feel that film allows me to tell a story in ways a single frame can’t. It adds time and depth, allowing the viewer to witness emotions evolve and shift within a short duration of time in a way stills can’t. Working with a composer to create an original score that fits the film one-to-one is also a unique part of the process; it becomes another layer of storytelling. Overall, film just feels more open and expansive in what it can hold through motion.

A lot of your images feel intimate without being overly staged. What draws you toward capturing people in a way that feels quiet, honest, and emotionally present?

I’m drawn to moments where people stop performing. For me, intimacy comes from trust rather than direction. It often appears in quiet gestures and small pauses that feel more honest than anything staged.

I’m less interested in appearance and more in what people carry internally, and how that gradually reveals itself in front of the camera over time. When working with models, you can often see this shift, the first image of the day can feel guarded, but as trust builds, the expressions and energy naturally change.

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ILLUSTRATED XXXX

ILLUSTRATED

Before fashion was photographed, it was drawn. Illustrated taps into that history, pulling from the graphic confidence of vintage fashion illustration and filtering it through the exaggerated, sculptural silhouettes currently shaping the SS26 season. The result is something that feels suspended between image and object, where clothes stop behaving like clothes and begin to resemble bold, graphic forms.

photography EMILY WHITE styling DOUGLAS MILLER

Here, colour, texture, and shape take centre stage.

Unexpected pairings create visual tension, while sharp lines, dramatic proportions, and moments of negative space transform each look into a composition of its own. Less about dressing and more about construction, Illustrated explores what happens when fashion is reduced to its purest elements and is rebuilt as something altogether more striking.

full look, TOM FORD

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full look, CHANEL

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ILLUSTRATED top, stockings, shoes, ALAÏA hat, EMILY LONDON

Top, Stockings & Shoes, ALAIA; Hat EMILY LONDON

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shirt, trousers, gloves, BALENCIAGA; hat, HARVY SANTOS

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full look, DIOR

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dress, MAISON MARGIELA

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makeup MARI KUNO; hair HIROSHI MATSUSHITA; producer JOHN MOURATIS; casting director SVEA GREICHGAUER; movement director ANGELICA WOLANSKA; dop MAXIMILIAN MCKAY; digi op CHLOE YATES; models LILLY GOUMET, NYARACH AYUEL; lighting assistant ALI MOHAMED; styling assistant HARRY LANGFORD; hair assistant NATSU TOMONAGA

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COVER STORIES

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SALMA ABU DEIF ON FIGURING OUT WHO SHE IS Wearing BVLGARI, the Egyptian actress sits with YUNG to discuss presence, perception, and why she has no desire to perform.

photography GREG ADAMSKI styling AHMED RASHWAN words MAI EL MOKADEM

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dress, LOEWE necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold and diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds ring, Serpenti Viper ring, rose gold with diamonds BVLGARI

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Salma Abu Deif is opting out in a landscape Before accepting a role, she imagines her- In Abu Deif’s eyes, acting, in a way, is a prowhere celebrity is usually measured self fully inside the script, interrogating its jection of a mindset. "Every artist—actor, by how much you’re willing to leak. To emotional truth. "Does the story make director, writer—brings their emotions, the public, she is a constant: the face sense to me? How true can it be to real- thoughts, and beliefs onto the story." By of Loewe in the region, a clear voice for ity?" If that gut-check fails, she walks rejecting roles that don’t speak her mind social causes, and the lead of heavy-hitaway without a second thought. There is and seeking out the rare "gift" of a good ting dramas like A’la Nesbet Moshahda, a fatalism in her career choices—a belief script, she is levelling up her game by and films like Ezma, Egybest and Sheikh that this is rizq. "I never regretted turning staying picky. In her world, if it doesn't Jackson. But to her, the "Salma" we see down something. No matter what, it just speak to her, she doesn't want to do it. is merely the art she chooses to lend us. wasn't mine."

Period.

Everything else is sacred.

When she does say yes, the process is Abu Deif’s career trajectory has been "I would rather be on the news for my work," almost meditative. To "disappear" into a lesson in learning to trust her gut—a she says, her voice carrying a steadiness roles like the one in 2026 Ramadan’s lesson she admits she had to learn the that seems to have solidified as she tran- 15-episode series Ard Wa Talab, Abu Deif hard way. "Every time I didn’t trust my sitioned from her 20s into her 30s. "If I relies on a cocktail of instinct and physical gut feeling, I regretted it. Until I learned share more, I feel like it’s stolen from me." discipline, working closely with directors the hard way: I need to listen to it." That This boundary is a survival mechanism for on breathing and grounding techniques. intuition now dictates her refusal to be a woman who has spent years being a It’s a delicate balance of bringing her typecast or to accept roles that frame vessel for other people’s stories, not a PR own beliefs and emotions to a role while women as secondary ornaments. strategy. “This is why I prefer to do very ensuring the character doesn't consume Ironically, it took a blunt encounter with a limited interviews,” she says. her. "You separate from who you are and famous international actor at a fashion the character you’re playing, just to be in event years ago to crystallize her self-bethe moment," she explains. lief. When she told him she didn’t think she Abu Deif recalls the intense, contained was a good actress, his response was a environment of Ard Wa Talab, where the sharp wake-up call. “If you think of youremotional weight of playing a morally self like that, I don’t know what to tell you.” complex character like Heba, became so He didn’t sugar coat things to her, and it heavy, she had to physically separate her- turned out to be exactly what she needed. self from the role. "I was telling myself: This “The encounter upset me at first, but when is not real. I’m Salma and this will be over. I I humbled myself and reflected on it, I realtake a moment away from everybody and ized that if I keep seeing myself that way, stabilize." then that becomes my reality,” she shares with YUNG. “It’s the Law of Attraction. You have to believe in something before you can become it.”

While acting requires her to disappear—"The character wears me," she notes—fashion offers her the rare chance to regain her own image. As Loewe’s first regional ambassador, she doesn't see the brand as a costume, but as a medium.

"When I do fashion, I can go crazy, classic, elegant, whatever my mood is. Usually, with fashion, I do more me."

It’s a full-circle moment for the girl who used to dream of wearing the designer dresses she now commands on red carpets. Yet, even in the turbo-charged world of fashion weeks and flashing bulbs, her mind is often elsewhere—specifically, on the legacy she is building for her daughter.

dress, LOEWE necklace, Serpenti, rose gold with diamonds and black onyx bracelets, B.zero1, yellow, rose and white gold ring, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds ring, Serpenti Viper, yellow gold with diamonds BVLGARI

“THE CHARACTER WEARS ME."

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top, skirt, heels, ALAÏA necklace, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx BVLGARI

necklace, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx bracelet, B.zero1, yellow gold bracelet, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds watch, Serpenti Seduttori (33mm), stainless steel, yellow gold with white silver opaline dial, quartz movement, waterproof 30m ring, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx ring, B.zero1 three-band, yellow gold BVLGARI

top, skirt, ALAÏA

Motherhood, often framed by the indusperformative representation and toward with emotionally intelligent directors try as a point of "stagnation," has had a "blood and flesh" reality where her char- who understand the nuances of human the opposite effect on Abu Deif. It hasn't acters aren't shown through stereotypical behaviour without a "misogynistic lens”, softened her ambition. "Now I want to do rose-coloured-sunglasses. highlighting the depth that comes when work that my daughter would be proud of. a director can truly put themselves in This insistence on authenticity extends to Motherhood gave my ambition a bonus." another person’s shoes. It’s this discithe Egyptian industry itself. The actress is pline—the ability to disappear into a role Abu Deif is not interested in roles that vocal about the conversations the induswhile maintaining the mental fortitude require her to be a "statement" for the try has historically avoided—domestic to tell herself this is not real—that has Middle East. She is, however, advocating violence, harassment, and the voices allowed her to navigate the most intense for a type of regional auteurism—stories that haven't been heard yet. While she scripts without burning out. that are local yet universally felt. "I want to acknowledges the progress made in play a human being, without any differen- recent years, she views her work as a “I enjoy working with women directors tiation in colour or religion," she explains. continuous push toward these un-told because I feel there’s usually a deeper For her, the goal isn't just to be an Arab stories. For Abu Deif, the international emotional understanding there,” she actor in a foreign film; it’s to export the stage isn't a destination to reach; it’s a explains. “But honestly, for me, it’s more Arab experience on its own terms. "I want by-product of being herself in her own about empathy. An empathetic, well-read, to do something that speaks our voice, language. emotionally intelligent director or writer our mind, our language, and take it out— someone who really understands She admits a preference for working side the region." It is a move away from people— that’s the perfect combination.”

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"NOW I WANT TO DO WORK THAT MY DAUGHTER WOULD BE PROUD OF. MOTHERHOOD GAVE MY AMBITION A BONUS."

dresses, NOON by NOOR necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold and diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds ring, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds bracelets, Serpenti Viper, rose and white gold with diamonds BVLGARI

stockings, STYLIST'S OWN shoes, LOEWE bracelets, B.zero1 in yellow, rose, and white gold ring, B.zero1 in white gold with pavé diamonds ring, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds BVLGARI

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"I DON’T WANT VALIDATION FOR WHO I AM, JUST MY ACTING OR WORK."

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earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds bracelets, B.zero1, rose, yellow and white gold ring, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx BVLGARI

dress, LOEWE

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jumpsuit, ALAÏA earrings, Serpenti Viper, yellow gold with diamonds necklace, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx BVLGARI

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She pauses before adding that female writers and directors sometimes bring a particular sensitivity to emotional nuance and inner worlds. “Women often understand emotions differently,” she says.

“When you’re writing a female character However, she has also mastered the art of especially, it takes someone who genu- the emotional filter. She recognizes that the vitriol found in comment sections is inely understands feelings and emotional rarely about her work and more about complexity to make that feel truthful.” the person behind the screen. "Some There is a kind of clarity that arrives with people write stuff if they had a bad day," one’s thirties. While her twenties were a she reflects. By categorizing certain neg"phase of discovering and going with the ative noise as a "projection" rather than a flow," her current decade has demanded personal failing, Abu Deif maintains her a more substantiated, sometimes uncomequilibrium. She seeks validation for the "Your mind is here and there, and here fortable, introspection. "In my thirties, I’m work, not for her existence. This highand there," she exclaims, describing the more grounded," she says, before adding level emotional intelligence allows her to frantic mental state right before a major with striking candour, "some parts I met in stay connected to her community withmoment. But for Abu Deif, that scattered my twenties, I didn't like." out being consumed by it. For her, the energy ends up being the catalyst. It’s the It is a rare admission in an industry con- audience is a partner in the storytelling difference between a performance that process, but they aren't the authors of her structed on the curation of perfection. Just is strictly "correct" and one that is electriself-worth. as she learned in acting school never to cally alive. By leaning into the pressure, not judge a character—to seek the motives running from it, she has turned her anxiety These days, she’s proving to herself—and behind even the most morally uncominto an understanding of exactly how to to the daughter watching her grow—that fortable roles—she is now applying that you can be a good person and a pow- navigate the eye of the storm. same non-judgmental lens to herself. By erhouse at the same time. As she looks Behind the "sneaky questions of journalrefusing to distance herself from her own toward her upcoming cinema releases ists" and the chatter of public opinion, Abu shadow sides, she has found a deeper and new TV roles, she does so with the Deif remains a woman who is still discovsense of internal peace. "I don’t like to confidence of someone who knows that ering her own layers. She is comfortable present anything to anybody... I like to be even if the spotlight disappeared tomorbeing in between—neither overexposed myself, for me, and still stick to myself." row, the woman standing in the centre of nor out of the picture. Success, she conit would remain unchanged.

This internal foundation is what allows her cludes, isn't found in the headlines she to navigate the strenuous world of global avoids, but in the healthy, stable life she While Abu Deif presents as a picture of fashion and celebrity without losing her returns to once the cameras are off. It’s composure, there is an internal storm that axis. She has stopped seeking validation the fact that after the cameras stop and she has learned to harness rather than for who she is, and redirected that need the Loewe dress is tucked away, she is still suppress. "I get addicted to performing toward her work. "I don’t want validation exactly who she intended to be. under pressure," she admits, a revealing for who I am," she insists, "just my acting look into the psychological engine that If everything she’s built were to disappear or work." It’s a distinction that protects her drives her most intense roles. This isn’t tomorrow, Abu Deif is confident that the spirit; by keeping her "private and sacred" the celebrity "I love my job" platitude; it’s a core of her—that inner child who remains parts off-limits, she ensures that even raw acknowledgement of the physiologiunshaped by the industry—would stay when the spotlight is at its brightest, the cal toll of the craft. perfectly intact. most authentic version of Salma Abu Deif She describes a nervous system that remains entirely her own. thrives on the edge—where the stress Validation is the industry’s primary curof a major scene or the chaos of a set rency, but she refuses to be spent by it. becomes a form of fuel. “I can’t control She doesn’t subscribe to the celebrity my impulses or emotions,” she admits. myth of not reading the comments. Abu “What I feel, I say.” It’s perhaps this exact Deif, instead, approaches her audience openness — this resistance to over-cuwith a mix of genuine intimacy and ironrating herself — that makes Abu Deif feel clad discipline. While her peers claim total compelling both on-screen and off. It is in digital abstinence to stay sane, she admits these moments that she finds her "truth," to looking for feedback —she just does it even if it means losing her temper or feelfrom behind a psychological shield. ing stressed to an extreme.

"I think fans and people who watch are very smart," she observes. "They’re well-read, watch a ton, and get alive from art itself."

This respect for the viewer’s intellect is why she values constructive criticism; she knows that a truly engaged audience can spot the authenticity of a "human behaviour" in a scene. She even recognizes the handles of long-time followers who have been with her since the start, acknowledging the time they give her with a sense of genuine gratitude.

OUR VOICE, OUR MIND, OUR LANGUAGE, AND TAKE IT OUTSIDE THE REGION.”

"I WANT TO DO SOMETHING THAT SPEAKS

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earrings, Serpenti Viper, yellow gold with diamonds BVLGARI

jacket, LOEWE

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dress, shoes, LOEWE bracelets, B.zero1, yellow, rose and white gold necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds ring, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx BVLGARI

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hair; SEBASTIAN ISKANDER; makeup JULIA RADA; styling assistant AGNES ROSENBECH; lighting assistant MOHAMMED JAZIM

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SANDY BELLA ON BECOMING HER OWN MEASURE Beyond perception and into process, the actress and model, wearing BVLGARI, steps into a sharper, more intentional version of herself.

photography JACK CHIPPER styling IGNACIO DE TIEDRA words NADINE KAHIL

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full look, LOEWE necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds bracelets, B.zero1, rose, white and yellow gold BVLGARI

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top, CELINE KWAN ring, Serpenti Viper two-coil, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, Serpenti, rose gold with diamonds and black onyx bracelet, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds bracelets, B.zero1, rose and yellow gold BVLGARI

“I’M NOT INTERESTED IN BEING REDUCED TO A SINGLE IMAGE, I’M BUILDING SOMETHING DEEPER, SOMETHING THAT REFLECTS WHO I TRULY AM.” Known for her role in Franklin, and the recently launched 7 Dogs, there is a version of Sandy Bella that people think they understand. It lives on the surface, in images, in quick impressions, in the quiet assumptions made before she has even spoken. But that version, the Lebanese actress makes clear, is That sense of “more real” is not about abandoning incomplete. What exists behind the surface is someone world for another. It is about evolution. Modelthing far more deliberate, built over time through ling remains part of her identity, but acting offers a discipline, repetition, and a refusal to be reduced to different kind of honesty, one that requires her to cona single frame. “I’m someone very disciplined and front herself, to understand emotion, to hold space focused,” she says. “People see the surface, but for complexity. It is not about being seen, but about behind it there’s a lot of work, consistency and intenbeing understood. tion in everything I do.”

And understanding, for Bella, is tied to intention. There It is this insistence on depth, on process over percepis a clarity in the way she approaches her career now, tion, that defines where she stands today. She’s no one that resists urgency in favour of direction. She is longer reacting to an industry, she’s slowly shaping not chasing visibility for its own sake. She is building her place within it. something, piece by piece. “I’m focusing on building Sandy Bella moves between modelling and acting, but my career step by step,” she says. “I also never stop the distinction between the two is becoming clearer. working on myself, I want to be good at everything.”

Modelling introduced her to visibility, to presence, to It is a statement that could sound simple, but it speaks the language of the image. Acting, however, is where to a deeper philosophy. Growth, for her, is not passive. she feels something shift internally, where expression It is active, continuous, and often unseen. It happens moves beyond aesthetics and into something more in the quiet moments, in preparation, in the decisions layered. “Modelling is part of me, it’s how I got here,” that never make it to the final image or the final scene. she explains, “but right now acting feels more real “I’m thinking long term, not just quick moments,” she and allows me to express myself more.” continues. “I don’t want to be seen just for the sake of being seen.”

That resistance to immediacy, to the fast pace of visibility that defines much of the industry, is what sets her apart. She is not interested in fleeting recognition.

She is interested in permanence, in building a body of work that reflects who she is becoming, not just who she appears to be.

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dresses, FLORENTINA LEITNER earrings, B.zero1, yellow gold with diamonds necklace, Serpenti Viper, in yellow gold with diamonds bracelets, B.zero1, rose, yellow and white gold ring, B.zero1 four-band, rose gold BVLGARI

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“I’M THINKING LONG TERM, NOT JUST QUICK MOMENTS. I DON’T WANT TO BE SEEN JUST FOR THE SAKE OF BEING SEEN, I WANT TO BUILD A CAREER THAT HOLDS MEANING, SOMETHING THAT LASTS BEYOND THE SURFACE AND REFLECTS REAL GROWTH.”

Her role in Franklin marked an important point in that journey. Not because of what audiences saw, but because of what it demanded from her behind the scenes. “Honestly, it’s the work behind it,” she says when reflecting on the experience. “It made me respect the process even more and understand how much work goes into every scene.”

It is a shift that many actors describe, but for Bella, it became a kind of foundation. A realization that performance is only a fraction of the story. That what shapes a role happens long before the camera starts rolling.

That awareness has changed the way she sees herself on screen. Not just in terms of confidence alone, but in also possibility. “Yes, it made me more aware of my potential and also more critical, in a good way,” she explains. “I see where I can push more now.”

There is something important in that phrasing, “critical in a good way.” It speaks to a kind of self-awareness that does not paralyze, but propels. A willingness to question, to refine, to demand more from herself without losing sight of what she has already achieved.

If Franklin was about understanding the process, 7 Dogs was about testing her limits. From the moment she encountered the project, there was an instinctive pull. Not toward comfort, but toward challenge.

“The energy of the project,” she says when asked what drew her in. “It felt bigger, more intense, with real responsibility, and aligned with the kind of roles I want.”

That sense of scale, of weight, is something she actively seeks. Not because it is easy, but because it forces growth. And growth, for Bella, seems to come most clearly when she is pushed beyond what feels familiar. “Proving myself on this project was no joke,” she adds.

There is no attempt to soften the experience. 7 Dogs demanded more from her, not just as an actress, but as a person navigating an environment where expectations were high and the margin for hesitation was small. “Being the only ‘new girl’ alongside such big names felt like a challenge in itself,” she says of starring alongside the likes of Karim Abdel Aziz, Ahmed Ezz and Monica Bellucci. “Like people were counting on me, and I had to rise to it.”

That pressure, rather than intimidating her, became a catalyst. A moment where discipline met opportunity, where preparation had to translate into presence. It And in adapting, she redefines what she is in these spaces, where comfort disappears, that is capable of. “I’ve always seen myself her approach reveals itself most clearly. She does not as disciplined and hard-working, but this retreat. She adapts. project pushed me to unlock a whole new level.”

am today, and I’m still pushing myself to grow,” she continues. “So I’m very clear on what I want.”

Clarity, in this sense, is not rigid. It is responsive, shaped by experience, by instinct, by the quiet decisions that accumulate over time. And some of those decisions are not always visible to others.

“Choosing to be more selective,” she says when asked how her outlook is evolving.

“Saying no to opportunities my instincts told me to turn down because something better suited me was coming, and it did.”

There is a kind of faith embedded in that approach. Not passive optimism, but an active trust in her own judgment, a belief that opportunities are not singular, that being available and positive are key. “I’ve never believed that opportunities come once in a lifetime,” she explains.

“What’s meant for you will find its way back in different forms,” she says.

It is a perspective that allows her to move without fear of missing out, to make decisions based on alignment rather than urgency. And in doing so, she creates space for something more intentional to emerge.

But while her internal world is grounded in clarity, the external perception of her remains something she continues to navigate. “People often assume I’m mean or unapproachable because of my fierce look,” she says.

That “new level” is not something she treats as a destination. It is part of an ongoing It is a familiar narrative, one that many women in the public process, one that continues to evolve as eye encounter. The reduction she becomes more selective about the of presence into personality, roles she chooses. “I’m going after strong, impactful roles,” she says. “I’m not inter- of expression into assumption. “I might come across as ested in anything that feels superficial or intimidating at first,” she adds, doesn’t add value to my growth.” “but once you get to know me, It is a clear line, one that defines both what you’ll realize I’m actually one she wants and what she refuses. In an of the kindest people you can industry that often rewards visibility over meet and work with.” substance, saying no becomes a form of control. A way of protecting the direction she has set for herself. “I’ve been working day and night to become the woman I

top, skirt, FENDI heels, EDELINE LEE earrings, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, Serpenti, rose gold with diamonds and black onyx rings, Serpenti Viper two-coil, rose gold with diamonds BVLGARI

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“BEING THE ONLY ‘NEW GIRL’ ALONGSIDE SUCH BIG NAMES FELT LIKE A CHALLENGE, LIKE PEOPLE WERE COUNTING ON ME.

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BUT INSTEAD OF STEPPING BACK, IT PUSHED ME TO RISE, TO PROVE TO MYSELF THAT I BELONG IN THOSE SPACES.”

dress, GIVENCHY earrings, B.zero1, yellow gold with diamonds necklace, B.zero1 Rock Chain, yellow gold with studded pendant set with black ceramic bracelet (L), Serpenti, rose gold with diamonds and black onyx bracelets (R), B.zero1, rose, yellow, and white gold ring, B.zero1 four-band, rose gold BVLGARI

rings, Serpenti Viper two-coil, rose gold with diamonds ring, B.zero1 four-band, rose gold BVLGARI

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coat, BURBERRY earrings, Serpenti Viper, white gold with diamonds BVLGARI

COVER STORIES

“I’VE NEVER BELIEVED THAT OPPORTUNITIES COME ONCE IN A LIFETIME. WHAT’S MEANT FOR YOU WILL FIND ITS WAY BACK IN DIFFERENT FORMS.” And right now, that work is focused on two things at once. “Building and evolving at the same time,” she says.

It is a simple statement, but it captures the essence of where she stands. Not at a fixed point, but in motion. Not defined by what she has done, but by what she is actively becoming.

There is a lightness in the way she says it, but also a quiet acknowledgment of the gap between perception and reality. It is a gap she does not seem intent on correcting aggressively. Instead, she focuses Sandy Bella is not trying to fit into an existon what she can control. Her work. Her ing narrative. She is constructing her own, one decision at a time. One role at a time. choices. Her direction.

“I feel most in control of my narrative when I’m focused, grounded, and in line with my goals,” she says.

Control, for Bella, is not about managing every external opinion. It is about alignment. About staying connected to what she is building, even when things do not move as quickly as she would like. “It feels like it’s slipping when things don’t move as fast as I want them to,” she admits. “It overwhelms me.”

That honesty, that willingness to acknowledge the tension between patience and ambition, adds another layer to her story. She is not detached from the pressures of the industry. She feels them. She responds to them. But she does not allow them to dictate her direction.

Instead, she returns to process. To discipline. To the quiet work that continues regardless of pace.

One step further away from perception and closer to intention.

What people see is a work in progress.

Beneath it, something entirely precise and driven is taking shape.

THIS IS YUNG

dress, TOM FORD earrings, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, Serpenti Viper, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, Serpenti, rose gold with diamonds and black onyx ring, Serpenti Viper two-coil, rose gold with diamonds BVLGARI

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hair TARIK BENNAFLA; makeup GEORGIA HOPE; digital technician SHAN STEWART; lighting assistant CHARLIE HALL; styling assistant MALAK AYMAN HOSSNY

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SERENA ABOU SEFYAN OPENS MORE THAN A SHOW Wearing BVLGARI, Serena Abou Sefyan on confidence, community, and carrying Lebanon and Armenia onto the global fashion stage.

photography GREG ADAMSKI styling POLINA SHABELNIKOVA words NADINE KAHIL

COVER STORIES

dress, FERRAGAMO stockings, STYLIST’S OWN shoes, VALENTINO earrings, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, B.zero1, rose gold bracelet, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds bracelet, Serpenti Viper, rose gold ring, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with onyx and diamonds ring, Tubogas ring, yellow gold ring, Doppio Baccellato, rose gold with peridot and amethyst BVLGARI

THIS IS YUNG top, ILAI SARAI shorts, MANGO stockings, CALZEDONIA shoes, GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI necklaces, Tubogas Serpenti, yellow gold with onyx and diamonds necklace, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds bracelets, Serpenti, yellow gold bracelet, Tubogas, yellow gold ring, B.zero1, yellow gold ring, Tubogas Serpenti, yellow gold with onyx and diamonds BVLGARI

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At just 20 years old, Serena Abou Sefyan has become one of the fashion industry's most exciting emerging names. Raised in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut, and proudly carrying both her Lebanese and Armenian heritage, the model recently made history by opening Fendi's Spring/Summer 2026 show in Milan before signing an exclusive contract with the Italian luxury house. What followed was a defining moment not only for her career, but also for a new generation of young talents looking for representation on the global stage.

In conversation with YUNG, Abou Sefyan reflects on the surreal experience of opening one of fashion's most prestigious runways, the challenges of navigating an industry built on resilience, and the responsibility she feels in representing her communities around the world.

Opening a Fendi show is an incredible opportunity for a model. What was going through your mind in the moments before you stepped onto that runway?

It all happened so fast that I barely had time to process it. Between airports, the casting, and the show itself, it didn’t really sink in until a few days later when I was at the Fendi headquarters in Milan and saw all the articles coming out. Seeing my face and name on pages I’d followed for years was a surreal moment.

Right before the show, I was incredibly nervous and genuinely wondered if I had stage fright. The second I stepped onto the runway, I got my answer. It felt completely natural, like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

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COVER STORIES dress, ELISABETTA FRANCHI gloves, BALENCIAGA earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, B.zero1, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream necklace, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds bracelets, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds bracelet, Tubogas, yellow gold bracelet, Tubogas rose, white and yellow gold ring, Serpenti Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds and black onyx BVLGARI

dress, BOTTEGA VENETA

You described your reaction as pure shock and excitement. Has the significance of that moment fully sunk in yet, and what did it mean to you personally?

Honestly, I still ask myself that sometimes.

Why me? Why was I lucky enough to be chosen not only to walk the show, but to open it and sign an exclusive?

What made it so meaningful was the timing. It happened during a period when I was feeling pretty low and questioning whether this was really the path I was meant to be on. In this industry, there’s only so much you can control, and I was doing everything I could on my end. The rest was out of my hands.

So when that opportunity came, I took it as a sign to keep going. It gave me a lot of confidence in myself and in the process.

You mentioned never having an Armenian model to look up to while growing up. How does it feel knowing you may now become that reference point for Coming from Bourj Hammoud and a younger generation? growing up in Lebanon, did your I still forget that I’m 20 until someone asks upbringing shape the way you me how old I am and I have to stop and approach fashion, beauty, and think about it for a second. So it’s a little self-expression today? surreal to think of myself as a reference point for anyone.

If I had someone to look up to as a point of reference, it would’ve made me relax a bit As a Lebanese-Armenian woman, more knowing that someone had done it how important was it for you to before. It would’ve made the dream feel represent both communities on less impossible. If a younger person can one of fashion’s biggest stages? look at my journey and think, “If she did it, Honestly, this question answers itself. why can’t I?” then that’s really meaningful Seeing the support from both commu- to me. nities afterward was enough to show As easy as it is to be put in a box, it’s just as me how much it meant. I received meseasy to get out of it. sages from complete strangers telling me to keep going and saying I was making them proud, which was really special.

If that comes with the responsibility of representing my Lebanese and Armenian roots, it’s one I’d carry with honour.

Growing up in Bourj Hammoud is very nostalgic for me. It’s filled with memories of my childhood and my grandparents’ house, where I spent most of my time while my parents were working. I never felt different. It always felt like there was no other world outside of the one I was in.

I think my upbringing made me very observant. When it comes to self-expression, I don’t like to overcomplicate it. I take it quite literally. Whatever I’m feeling is reflected in the way I dress or carry myself.

I don’t really fit into a single category, and I don’t think I need to.

THIS IS YUNG

90-91 earrings, Divas's Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds ring, Tubogas, yellow gold ring, Doppio Baccellato, yellow gold with peridot and amethyst necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds watch, Serpenti Tubogas watch (35mm), steel and rose gold with diamonds bracelet, B.zero1, rose gold BVLGARI

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“THE SECOND I STEPPED ONTO THE RUNWAY, IT FELT COMPLETELY NATURAL, LIKE I WAS EXACTLY WHERE I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE.”

You have spoken openly about how modelling was not always understood within the Lebanese-Armenian community. What were some of the biggest misconceptions you encountered, and how did you overcome them?

Paris has very high standards. It can be hard to hold onto your confidence and discipline when you feel like, no matter how much you try, you’ll never be like “them.” Those thoughts creep in when you’re already vulnerable, but part of the job is knowing yourself well enough to snap out of it.

The reactions were usually a snarky smirk, or comments like, “Okay, but what about when it’s over?” or “What are you going to do when this fails?”

What have the past two years taught you about resilience, especially in an industry that is often defined by rejection and uncerI understand those remarks often come from a place tainty? of concern for stability, but at the same time, no one, including them or myself, can really predict the future. It’s not definite that it will end. It will end when it’s meant to, and right now that doesn’t feel like the case at all.

I think there’s also this misconception that anything creative, whether it’s studying English literature, art, or modelling, is just a side hobby rather than something that can be a full-time career.

I usually handled it with a smile and a simple “let’s see,” and left it at that. I’ve never really been affected by social pressure in that way.

At just 20 years old, you've already worked across Paris, London, Milan, Madrid, and Barcelona. Which city has challenged you the most creatively and professionally?

Paris is my favourite city to this day, which makes it ironic that it’s also the one that challenged me the most.

It was the first city I ever travelled to for modelling, and I went alone. Navigating life with other models and, to be honest, strangers at the time, was a level of independence I hadn’t really experienced before. It was scary, but we made it through.

At the beginning, I actually had a healthier mindset than I did in the middle of it all. I understood that rejection had nothing to do with me personally. It was just about not being the direction a brand needed at that time.

But I’ve faced so many rejections I’ve honestly lost count. Each one is bound to affect your morale at some point, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me second-guess myself like any normal person would.

Still, somehow I always went back and gave even more than I did the first time.

Having a strong support system is what really helped me get through it.

blazer, trousers, MAISON MARGIELA top, STYLIST'S OWN bracelets, B.zero1, yellow, rose and white gold rings, B.zero1, yellow gold ring, B.zero1, rose and white gold BVLGARI

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“IF THAT COMES WITH THE RESPONSIBILITY OF REPRESENTING MY LEBANESE AND ARMENIAN ROOTS, IT’S ONE I’D CARRY WITH HONOUR.”

coat, TOM FORD top, STYLIST’S OWN skirt, WEEKEND MAX MARA stockings, CALZEDONIA earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds ring, Cabochon yellow gold with amethyst and diamonds ring, Doppio Baccellato, yellow gold with peridot and amethyst bracelets, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds BVLGARI

THIS IS YUNG coat, TOM FORD top, STYLIST’S OWN skirt, WEEKEND MAX MARA stockings, CALZEDONIA earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds ring, Cabochon yellow gold with amethyst and diamonds ring, Doppio Baccellato, yellow gold with peridot and amethyst bracelets, Tubogas, yellow gold with diamonds BVLGARI

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Fendi has now signed you as an exclusive model. What was your experience like working with the house, and what makes the brand special from a model's perspective?

In this job, you usually move from set to set and rarely see the same people twice. But with Fendi, it felt different. The team became like a family.

I wasn’t just jumping between jobs. I could walk onto set, greet everyone, and actually know them, ask about their lives, and have that connection be mutual.

Even outside of work, a lot of the team reached out when Lebanon wasn’t in a safe situation just to make sure my family and I were okay. That kind of care stays with you.

"IF A YOUNGER PERSON CAN LOOK AT MY JOURNEY AND THINK, ‘IF SHE DID IT, WHY CAN’T I?’ THEN THAT’S REALLY MEANINGFUL TO ME.”

Looking back at the younger Serena who may have felt like the “troublemaker” compared to her academically driven sister, what would you tell her today?

I wouldn’t tell her anything, because she’s the one who got us to where we are now and she clearly knew what she was doing.

I never felt like I was less than my sister just because I wasn’t as academically strong as she was. We always knew we were good at completely different things, and my parents never made it into something negative.

I remember being happy and celebrating even if I just passed with half a grade, while for her a 96 would raise the question of why it wasn’t 100. She has always had that perfectionist mindset, and she delivers on it. And I do too, just in a different way.

earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds bracelet, B.zero1, rose gold ring, Tubogas, yellow gold ring, Doppio Baccellato, yellow gold with peridot and amethyst watch, Serpenti Tubogas (35mm) in steel, rose gold with diamonds BVLGARI

full look, ALAÏA

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dress, STYLIST'S OWN

hair IVAN KUZ; makeup SAFIYAH CASSIM; styling assistant RIHA MEHINDI; lighting assistant MOHAMMED JAZIM

earrings, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds earrings, B.zero1, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with diamonds necklace, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds bracelet, Serpenti Viper, rose gold bracelet, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother of pearl ring, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl ring, Divas' Dream, rose gold with mother-of-pearl and diamonds BVLGARI

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CARRIED AWAY

CARRIED AWAY Inside the handbags defining this season’s mood.

curation NADINE KAHIL collages MALAK AYMAN HOSSNY

hazelnut minaudière, CHANEL

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CARRIED AWAY

arcadie, MIU MIU

birkin, HERMÈS

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clicca, BALENCIAGA

CARRIED AWAY

express, LOUIS VUITTON

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manta, MCQUEEN

CARRIED AWAY

baguette 26424 re-edition, FENDI

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library, LACOSTE

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CARRIED AWAY

half moon, CELINE

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bonnie, PRADA

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CARRIED AWAY

baby veneta, BOTTEGA VENETA

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saddle, CHRISTIAN DIOR

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CARRIED AWAY

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Inside the Loewe atelier, Getafe, Madrid, Spring 2015, Luis Venegas.

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Window designs by José Pérez de Rozas at the Loewe store, Gran Vía, 8, Madrid, 1956 – 1975.

180 YEARS OF LOEWE

Original Amazona Bag from the AnteOro Collection, 1975.

Loewe Catalogue, FW 1979-1980, photography: Michel Malka.

Every Arab family has one. The grand- was built around touch. Precision. Material. llough and Lazaro Hernandez continue mother who moved through rooms as The idea that an object should become that conversation through the Amazona though she'd already decided how they'd more beautiful the longer it exists. Today, 180, a sharper reinterpretation of the origremember her, silk pressed, posture Loewe stands as the second-oldest inal icon created to mark the house’s impeccable, a leather bag on her arm that luxury fashion house in the world, a dis- 180th anniversary. she'd had for longer than anyone could tinction that reflects not only its age but Fashion has responded accordingly. Bella recall. You didn’t know the name of it as a also its remarkable ability to evolve while Hadid has carried it. Sarah Pidgeon too, child. You just knew it was hers, that it was remaining rooted in craftsmanship. fully immersed in her quietly devastating always the same one, that the leather had Perhaps that is why the Amazona still res- Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy era. But the softened in exactly the right places and onates fifty years after its introduction in fascination surrounding the Amazona 180 the hardware still caught the light. Even1975. Soft yet structured, polished with- feels deeper than trend-driven obsession. tually it found its way to your mother, then out rigidity, the bag became symbolic of Luxury itself is shifting again. After years of to you. You never questioned it. That bag, a certain kind of woman — elegant withlogos, spectacle, and algorithmic dressin all likelihood, was a Loewe. out needing to announce herself. Under ing, fashion is returning to permanence.

Few luxury houses understand longevity Jonathan Anderson’s creative direction, To pieces with memory attached to them. the way Loewe does. Founded in Madrid the Amazona returned to the forefront a Loewe has always operated from that in 1846 as a collective of leather artisans, few years ago, reconnecting a new genperspective. the Spanish house was never built around eration with the house’s heritage. Now, hype, celebrity, or fashion spectacle. It current Creative Directors Jack McCo-

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180 YEARS OF LOEWE XXXX

Loewe internal catalogue, Barcelona, 1960s.

By 1905, the house had become an official supplier to the Spanish royal family. In 1970, the now-iconic Anagram logo was introduced: four interlocking Ls that became instantly recognizable without ever needing overexposure. Then came the Flamenco in 1979, and decades later, the Puzzle bag, each design carrying the same underlying philosophy of craftsmanship and material intelligence.

What often gets overlooked in conversations around Loewe is that its craft language was never confined to accessories

alone. The house’s ready-to-wear history includes influential creative voices who helped shape its evolution. During the 1970s, renowned designer Ken Scott collaborated with Loewe, creating vibrant womenswear and ready-to-wear collections that brought a fresh, modern spirit to the Spanish house. Around the same period, Karl Lagerfeld also contributed to Loewe's fashion direction, helping elevate its ready-to-wear ambitions as the brand expanded beyond leather craftsmanship. Shortly afterward, Giorgio Armani worked with Loewe between 1977 and 1979,

the bags exists in the tailoring, silhouettes, textures, and moveoverseeing the brand’s women's ready-to-wear collections as ment of the clothing itself. it expanded internationally. These collaborations quietly helped position Loewe as more than a leather goods specialist, broad- That resonates deeply within Arab culture too. Across the region, ening its fashion vocabulary while preserving its commitment to material objects have long carried emotional continuity. Embroicraftsmanship. dery passed between generations. Gold kept for daughters.

Leather softened through decades of use. Long before “quiet Alongside Armani, whose collaboration with Loewe remains one luxury” became a trend cycle, the region already understood the of fashion’s quietest achievements, are names like Ken Scott. value of objects designed to endure.

Thanks to Scott's early work, the same sensitivity that defines

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Salma Abu Deif for Loewe, photography: Talia Chetrit.

180 YEARS OF LOEWE

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180 YEARS OF LOEWE

Advertisement for the Loewe store on Calle Serrano, Madrid, mid 1920s.

Bella Hadid with the Amazona bag.

Now, 180 years after its founding, Loewe continues under Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez with that same philosophy intact.

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The words shaping this issue are hidden in plain sight.

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ANANTARA BIENNALE CRAFTSMANSHIP COUTURE CURATOR EXPLORATION HABIBI

HEATWAVE INTENTION LEGACY MARIOLINO RITUAL RUNWAY RUPTURE

SERPENTI SOULFUL SWANA TARAB TOURBILLON VENICE WATAN

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SOLE SEARCHING: WHAT JADEN SMITH FOUND AT CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

words YASMINA F. BITAR

SOLE SEARCHING: WHAT JADEN SMITH FOUND AT CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

All images courtesy of Christian Louboutin.

Christian Louboutin’s firstever men’s creative director on his debut collection, the craft behind it, and what he hopes outlasts the launch-day noise.

“You just have to put your all into everything you make.”

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SOLE SEARCHING: WHAT JADEN SMITH FOUND AT CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

Jaden Smith appeared for our interview as a black square. There was no outfit to decode, no face softened by laptop light, no red sole angled into frame. Only a voice, still fizzing from Madison Square Garden.

The morning his debut Christian Louboutin collection reached stores worldwide, New York was talking about the Knicks. So was Smith.

“My good friend Karl plays for them,” he said, meaning Karl-Anthony Towns, whose team had taken Game 4 by a single point.

For a figure so often treated as an image — son, muse, polymath — Smith began with fandom. The shoes could wait; the box score could not.

“It’s like this red castle in my “I feel really good,” he told me. “The collection is in stores all over the world.” He kept mind. Four circling the scale of it. “Anyone, anywhere can go and see it for themselves,” he said, generations “try it on.” The thing from his head was now behind glass in Paris or Dubai, close of men live enough for a stranger to press a nose to the window and want it. The shoes are inside it.” everywhere and nowhere near everyone’s price; some four-figure tags make your chest tighten before you have even tried them on.

Louboutin, in any case, hardly needs visibility. The red sole is legible from across a room, even from under a crossed leg. The harder problem was quieter: how to make the men’s house feel newly lived-in without breaking the spell.

When Christian Louboutin named Smith its first-ever men’s creative director last autumn, the appointment arrived with the question that trails every famous name When Smith talks about the work, the creative director calculus falls away. handed a creative title: what, exactly, is being bought — the taste, the follow- Asked who he designs for, he does not name a customer or a demographic. He ing, the face? The cynical maths is easy describes a building. enough. Famous name plus old house equals noise.

“It’s like this red castle in my mind,” he said.

The courtship, at least, was slower than the “Four generations of men live inside it. You have the patriarch, then the father, the announcement made it seem. Loubouson, then the youngest son.” tin’s call reached him while he was making an album, running Misfits — his creative He lets that sit there — a red castle, four collective and production company — men, no apology — and you decide and posting his work on Instagram. “You whether it is a design philosophy or the just never know who’s watching,” he said. start of a fairy tale. “The wildest pieces,” He told me he studies people every day he added, “belong to the youngest,” the who would never imagine he is looking at one closest to himself. their work “very deeply.” His lesson was almost embarrassingly sincere. “You just The image is almost too available to psychoanalysis: a young man from one of have to put your all into everything you America’s most watched families imagmake.” For Smith, the operating faith of a ining masculinity as a house of fathers, generation — post into the void, whether sons and inheritance. For a sentence, I that void is twenty people or 20 million, and pray the right person is scrolling — waited for it to curdle a bit. It didn’t. What held it up was where he said it began: Itaactually paid off. ly’s factories.

There, he noticed, “trade skills are passed down generation to generation within a single family,” with the grandfather, the father and the son all touching the same shoe at different stages of its life. The question he kept asking himself was whether he was making “something that every man in this family can attach themselves to and get behind” — a dedication, as he put it, “to a specific craft, to humanity.” The fairy tale had a factory floor.

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SOLE SEARCHING: WHAT JADEN SMITH FOUND AT CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN

“The Louboutin codes work and have worked before. Now I’m looking Depending on your age or algorithm, you for newer might know Jaden Smith as The Karate Kid, the boy trading bars with Bieber, or codes in the teenager who declared himself, with eerie accuracy, an “icon living.” For years, the colour that range read as Smith sprawl. Fashion has since learned to take sprawl seri- language, the ously. At Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh made architecture, quotation marks and DJ logic photography, feel like house codes; Pharrell Williams brought the producer’s ear, the instinct the direction.” for a hook, the feel for cultural tempera-

I told him the clothes I love most are my grandfather’s blazers, and he understood immediately. A blazer remembers the shoulders before yours: the trace of oud in the lining, a pocket square softened by weddings and funerals, an old valet ticket left crumpled in the inside pocket. Smith had arrived at the same feeling by another route, through the factory floor and the imagined maison. The collection, he said, could be “passed hand to hand.” He pictured “all of those men in the family going into the store at the same time,” each recognising himself in a different corner of the room.

ture. Smith arrives from the same weather “In between the base leather and the fabric, system, where a creative career spreads there’s a little Christian Louboutin canopy sideways instead of climbing. logo coming out of it,” he said. “The stitching is so detailed, the way it pops His way in is musical. “Hip hop is at the core out, the letters contrasting — I just love it.” of who I am,” he said. Then the answer The shoe changed repeatedly between turned synaesthetic. Fashion needed “a sample and store. In footwear, the toe is really strong rhythm,” he said; a collection temperament. Metal made the boot feel could move in “a major scale” or “a minor scale.” A shoe could be tuned; a silhou- armoured; roundness softened it; the square-off gave the cowboy reference ette could keep time. This first collection a cleaner authority. It was another way of was pitched “really heavily” to faster rap tuning masculinity, this time by the millimusic, the pulse under the leather. metre.

He was fluent in all of it — the scales, the codes, the red castle in his head — until I He is careful with what he has inherited. mentioned that “Rainbow Bap,” one of his “The Louboutin codes work and have worked before,” he said. “Now I’m looking earlier songs, had appeared in my Spotify for newer codes in the colour language, Wrapped. “No way.” The grin was audible. the photography, the direction.” Red, to For a beat, the creative director cadence him, is “a character in the stories that broke into something younger and we tell,” powerful and luxurious and full unguarded. Then the precision returned, of extreme passion. Stand on Brompton and so did the shop-talk, a cowboy boot Road long enough and that character bringing him into focus. reveals its full social range: the Gulf prince fresh off the Harrods valet, the party girl visiting from Miami, the man who swears he hates logos and tilts his heel just enough for you to clock the red.

Display, though, was never quite Smith’s register, and his sincerity is easy to flatten from a distance. He has spent his public life being read by people sure they knew what he meant before he had said anything at all: Will Smith’s son, the heir to a family mythology that left little room for his own.

Up close, or as close as one gets to a black square, the eccentricity read as method, not pose — a way of making sincerity survive the watching.

The announcement drew the expected noise; Smith was not interested in answering it. “I just want to let it speak for itself,” he said. “That’s the job — to create the stuff.” Twenty years on, he hopes, a stranger who finds one of the shoes at the back of a father’s closet will understand the feeling he was trying to leave behind: that people had been adventurous then, and “willing to be wild.”

By then, perhaps, the creative director appointment will have faded, and the launch-day posts will have disappeared into the archive. What might last is harder to manufacture: a shoe that feels less bought than inherited.

The camera stayed off the whole time, so I never saw the shoes or the man. I was left instead with the image he had given me of an object moving from hand to hand, gathering meaning as it goes, until someone who does not know the whole story puts it on anyway.

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words MENNA SHANAB

A TREE, NOT A FRUIT: LINA MAKOUL How Lina Makoul escaped becoming a symbol.

This is a story about someone escaping being turned into a symbol.

First, Lina Makoul was turned into a symbol of coexistence. Then she was expected to become a symbol of resistance. And "I fully realized I am a tree rather than a fruit,” much of her life's work since has been Lina Makoul writes. an attempt to become simply a person again. To reclaim power over herself and For years, the world treated her like fruit. her voice. Where it comes from, where it Something that can be consumed. is going and how it lands when it arrives.

Something to display. Useful.

At some point in her early career, Makoul Most stories about Makoul begin with a She was for many a symbol of coexistence. had a realisation that she had become handful of obvious markers: Arab Idol.

A narrative. An answer to questions that a story that other people were telling Nationality. Coexistence. Controversy. were far bigger and heavier than any one and she would come to spend the next Identity. The headlines feel like they artist could possibly carry. decade of her life fighting to reclaim almost write themselves. A Palestinian authorship over herself and her voice.

This profile is not about a Palestinian artist citizen of Israel. A singer with mobility navigating identity. There are plenty of between Arabic and Western musical So that made me reflect. Who gets to those stories. And they are important, realms. A young woman carrying the define an artist? The artist? The industry? necessary stories. But this is not one of weight of multiple audiences and expec- The state? The audience? The algorithm? them. tations.

History itself?

“Once I understood what propaganda meant, I couldn't unsee that I was one in the making."

- Lina Makoul

Image courtesy of the artist.

she tells me. "I was playing classical piano and dancing ballet while also practicing Arab dancing, aweehas, and zaghareet at all my 30 cousins' weddings."

"I guess that's how my personality and taste developed, so moving between these worlds feels super natural to me." Way The answer, for Makoul, seems to have before journalists, audiences, and instichanged several times as the years have tutions found her and became interested passed by. in categorizing her, Makoul was already To understand who she is today, it is worth living comfortably inside complexity.

People projected onto her. Media organizatracing the arc that brought her here. She tions, institutions did too. She was part of By nineteen, everybody already knew who was a gifted young singer from Acre who other people’s political fantasies. she was. She had become visible on a was raised between worlds that many scale most young artists can hardly imag- What emerged was not Lina Makoul the outsiders most likely imagine as conine. Yet visibility did not necessarily bring person, but Lina Makoul the narrative. tradictory but that she experienced as clarity. If anything, it created a new kind of “Once I understood what propaganda entirely natural. "I grew up listening to distortion. In a way, this visibility made her meant, I couldn't unsee that I was one Fairuz and Wadih El Safi with my parents, less visible as it produced an unexpected in the making." That feels like the kind of while also watching MTV, memorizside effect: the gradual disappearance of sentence that only arrives after years of ing Western pop albums, and watching the person beneath the narrative. reflection, carrying the weight of hardArgentinian telenovelas from a young age,"

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earned hindsight. "It was so strange to observe yourself being used as a whitewashing tool," she says. "It took some time to understand the whole thing and oppose it."

Looking back, Makoul can now identify the For her, proximity changes the equation. "When you live so physically close to machinery around her. At the time, she what's happening, and you're not allowed was simply just living through it. "Thank to speak up, you turn inward because you God for being a free thinker," she says.

Supported by family and by a loyal audi- have to find alternatives for expressing The deepest transformation, however, what you want to express." ence, she gradually fought to "win myself seems to be her evolving understandback and take the independent path and The result is a different artistic project altoing of freedom itself. When I ask her do things my way, even if it meant it would gether. It is not “What do you think?” but what she no longer believes at thirty that take 100 times the effort, resources, and “What does this do to a person?” she believed at twenty, she says, "Ouf." thicker skin."

Then comes the answer. "I used to think What does grief do to a person? Fear?

This is the point where the tree metaphor freedom means having financial and Helplessness? What happens to tenderbegins to make sense. "I fully realized commercial success." ness under pressure?

I am a tree rather than a fruit." A fruit is consumed but a tree survives. A fruit is a "You have to be creative and actually break The answer feels important because it reframes everything that came before it. down and understand what it is you're product, but a tree develops roots. feeling so you're able to express it in a "I felt like I constantly needed to explain The distinction reveals the journey she myself and prove that I walk the talk." She more abstract way," she explains. The would spend the next decade undertakwanted to demonstrate that indepenartist becomes a translator of emotional ing – learning to separate her existence dence was possible. She wanted to know experience rather than a commentator from the narratives built around it. What what artistic freedom actually felt like. "I on events. A vessel, companion and witfollowed was a struggle for self-posseswanted to know true independence in my ness. sion. It was an attempt to become rooted art because, in real life, I'm already occuenough to withstand the forces actively The distinction becomes clearest when pied." she says something I keep returning to: trying to define her.

"Making music for Palestinians and Arabs, Maybe art cannot replace freedom, but it is Many artists respond to pressure by one of the few places where true freedom rather than about them, makes a great becoming louder, but Makoul appears to can still be practiced. Eventually, provdifference." have moved inward. When I ask her about ing gave way to documenting. "I started the emotional undercurrents in her work, Music about people often explains them. to shift towards making art for the sake Music for people accompanies them. she immediately reframes the premise. "I of documenting my own understandings, One seeks to represent and the other think the difference is that to me this is not rather than pleasing a trend-trained ear." seeks to recognise. politics, it's my daily life." Politics is often Today, she creates from a different place something discussed from a distance.

Again and again, Makoul returns to the altogether. "If I die at any given time, I Life is something lived. emotional rather than the ideological. don't want to feel like I held anything back.

The farther she moved from externally I want my art to fully represent me, my At one point I ask her about the tension imposed narratives, the more inward abilities, my taste, and everything I was between softness and resistance in her her work became. Many people expect capable of expressing, even if it takes a work. I felt as though she had been wantPalestinian artists to speak in direct politwhile for people to get it." ing to talk about it. She says, "Preserving ical language. To issue statements and our child-like heart, and that child-like She continues, “I believe we, as artists, become interpreters of events. tenderness and softness, is to me the have much more power than we're often Makoul seems more interested in conse- biggest goal and the main form of resisallowed to realise," she says. "That's tance." quences. Not what people think, but what exactly why we're faced with this amount people feel. "We're in a phase where comof control and restriction in the form of For Makoul, resistance is refusing to harden. mercial artists are trying to create with contracts." This is how she now views the It is protecting the part of yourself that more intention and purpose in their art," industry itself; as both a system of opporremains capable of wonder, vulnerability, she says. "Because of the urgency that tunity and a system of control. joy, and love. "That's really the only way to comes with the atrocities we're witnesswin," she says. "Everything else is a dis"The freer I became in creating, the more ing – and the helplessness and distance traction."

I understood that nothing will fulfil you we feel from them – a lot of it comes out other than being your own master. My as political without the emotional level of Many Palestinian artists are asked to idea of identity, art, and freedom is being become symbols of something larger it." able to think independently and observe than themselves. Entire histories are my thoughts rather than engaging with projected onto individual lives. Makoul them. To find freedom in stillness no pushes back against the premise. "I think matter the chaos." And perhaps most when you're an artist who lives in Palesbeautifully: "To preserve the light in my tine, your day-to-day life humbles you. eyes and those around me."

We know the occupation in its actual size, not through imagination. If we could be Perhaps this is the clearest way to undersomething bigger than what we actually stand Lina Makoul's evolution: her music are, we would've been free from oppresdocuments a gradual refusal to perform sion generations ago." certainty.

This dismantles the fantasy of the artist as The public version of Makoul once required saviour. It is also a reminder that artists are certainty. Be it about identity, coexistence, human beings first. belonging, representation. Makoul as she stands today seems far less interested in certainty than in truth. And truth, unlike propaganda, rarely arrives in simple forms.

Image courtesy of the artist.

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words YASMINA F. BITAR

THE ARABIC SOUND As Arabic pop, regional samples, and diasporic memory move through global dance floors, a new electronic sound is taking shape — one that resists easy translation.

February in London. Grey sky, grey pavement, grey psychic weather. You’re on the Northern Line with wired headphones House music is often framed as the gateand a SoundCloud link acquired through way, the thing that made Arabic sound someone’s cousin’s DJ boyfriend when an newly legible to Western audiences. Sudedit of “Nour El Ein,” stretched over a 4/4 denly, Berlin DJs were layering dabke beat, turns the commute into something percussion over techno; Amr Diab edits embarrassingly close to longing. were landing on dance floors that had never knowingly encountered a maqam Suddenly you’re sunburnt in Saint-Troscale. That’s the accepted chronology. pez. Then a Beirut basement: low ceiling, Mine happened in reverse. Arabic pop led condensation on the walls, bass vibratme to house. ing beneath the sternum. The DJ drops a warped Arabic sample and every Arab in At twelve, I used to make my mother turn the room starts shouting the lyrics while off Amr Diab a block before school, peteveryone else realises — a beat too late — rified that someone might hear. I wanted that this was never their cue. Salt air, linen Bruce Springsteen. The Beatles. Cultural shirts still damp from the sea, the sacred anonymity, ideally. A single chorus could annual migration south that your bank reveal more about me than I had intended account has already declined on your to share. behalf. You’ve missed your stop by three Now I cross continents to stand in crowded stations. rooms watching strangers lose their Arab house excels at one thing above all minds to the same songs I once tried else: turning summer into a shared hallu- to hide. A man in a linen shirt — the sort cination long before London does. who, ten years ago, might have made his Arab classmate’s life hell over the smell of baba ghanoush in a lunchbox — is beside me yelling “Ahla Leila Ahla Nas” in deeply unwell Arabic. He is euphoric. So am I.

OF

Image courtesy of the artist, Ahmed Spins, DHB.

HOUSE

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Image courtesy of the artist, Ahmed Spins, DHB.

At a sold-out London show, he played Elissa’s “Aayshalak.” The original. No remix. No edit. The violins arrived and two thousand people disappeared at once. Beside me, a girl mouthed every lyric with her eyes closed, as though retrieving a memory rather than listening to a song. The guy next to her was Googling the words in real time. One remembering, one discovering Arab electronic music is everywhere now, — the song generous enough to hold both. though nobody involved seems especially eager to define it. The arguments On his last European tour, DJ Habibeats are aesthetic, generational, occasionnoticed more non-Arabs than ever before. ally territorial. How much of the original More people arriving without the lansurvives the translation? A scene cal- guage. They dance anyway.

Photo @FKNSTRADA, DJ Habibeats, cifies the moment everyone agrees on Ahmed Spins, the Moroccan DJ and artis- Coachella. what it should sound like. This one is alive tic director of Deep House Bible, smiling because nobody does. the expectation that African artists should almost constantly, approaches the sound be culturally legible in only one way. “You DJ Habibeats grew up watching his uncle DJ from a different direction. His ear was can’t just come to Brazil and play Brazilian Arab at weddings. Palestinian-American, shaped by his sister’s disco records, his music,” Ahmed says. “They already have it.

Bay Area-raised, wiry and kinetic behind cousin’s house crates, and a Moroccan They want something new.” the decks, he never saw why Arabic pop childhood saturated in Nass El Ghiwane should remain separate from the sounds and Hoba Hoba Spirit. By the time he Ask him about remixing Nass El Ghiwane that raised him: house, hip hop, funk, rap. started producing, the influences were and he pauses. “The rule of thumb is One of his earliest remixes took Nancy too varied to let any single one dominate. you have to make it better. And I don’t Ajram’s “Ya Tab Tab” and spliced it with know how I can make the record better, He is wary of turning cultural identity into Brazilian funk. “I thought nobody would because it’s so good.” The Moroccan genre obligation. He admires Black Coffee, get it,” he says. “I made it anyway because references remain in the DNA of the set the South African house titan, for resisting I thought it sounded dope.” rather than becoming its entire premise.

Palestinian-Jordanian artist Keena has no Part of why this circuit keeps expanding is interest in becoming ambience for someArab hospitality, a competitive advantage body else’s set. In a scene hungry for nobody talks about. DJs come back to Arabic vocals, that is a political position the region because the welcome lingers as much as an aesthetic one. Producers in the body. After a sunrise set in Beirut, want the feeling of Arabic vocals, someAhmed walked into Zaatar w Zeit the next Deep House Bible, the events platform times more than the meaning. She built morning, the designated afters spot, and Ahmed helped build from Boston college her own production team accordingly. “I the entire café erupted. Clapping. Shoutparties to stages at the Pyramids of Giza don’t want to just exist as a feature,” she ing. Strangers replaying the night back to and Morocco’s Agafay Desert, began the says. “I want my voice to sit at the centre.” him over breakfast as though it belonged way most enduring scenes do: as kids to all of them. “They’re just happy to be Three different relationships to the same trying to impress their friends. Before there,” he says. Then, more quietly: “You’re inheritance, and three different answers hosting a single event in Morocco, his like, wow… this is why I’m doing this.” to what translation should cost. two non-Arab co-founders visited “like ten times,” travelling the country north to Artists spend most of their lives in tranA sound can carry almost any amount of south, collecting friendships before they sit: airports, green rooms, hotel lobbies meaning. What it cannot do, on its own, collected audiences. “They fell in love with designed to feel interchangeable. Then is sustain a scene. That requires rooms, the place first,” he says. “It’s not just a bal- a city like Beirut interrupts the anonymity. repetition, infrastructure: people willing to ance-sheet event. We feel extra pressure Arab nightlife operates on the assumpcare excessively about things most audito get it right — even if we’re barely break- tion that if you shared the dance floor, you ences will never notice. ing even.” Crowds know when they’re should probably stay for breakfast too. being courted and when they’re being mined.

DJ Habibeats’ Habibi’s House nights are the diasporic version: temporary cities built from recognition. “Kids of immigrants just like me,” he says, “people who grew up with one foot in the culture and the other in whatever country their parents migrated to.”

Image courtesy of the artist, Keena.

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Cities like Beirut, Cairo, and Casablanca function as testing grounds. Ahmed describes them as early-adopter markets: crowds raised around music, curious about where it can still go. “You can try things,” he says. “Go out of your comfort zone, test new music, see what works.”

A track gets refined in Morocco, tested again in Beirut, then played in a warehouse in Brooklyn. The circuit operates like an R&D pipeline disguised as a party calendar.

Image courtesy of the artist, Keena.

porous, unfinished in a way that lets artIn Amman, the scene still feels socially ists leave fingerprints on it before the close enough for individuals to change edges harden. For Keena, that unfinishits direction. The same people DJing the edness is the reason to stay. parties are designing the flyers, organising the lineups. London and Berlin In scenes like this, questions of sound inherited decades of nightlife infrastruc- quickly become questions of repre- Her debut track, “Aman,” made with Nandu sentation. When I ask Keena about her & Radeckt, carries that conviction quietly ture. In Amman, much of it still exists in influences, she cites Johannes Fabian, inside it. The track has travelled through provisional form, held together by favours, the anthropologist who argued that the clubs and festivals whose audiences instinct, and whoever answers the phone further a culture sits from the West, the will likely never parse the lyrics, which at 2AM. further back in time it tends to be placed. describe the experience of trying to reach The rooms are smaller, the crowds more Denied contemporaneity, stripped of the Palestine and being unable to. The vocals literate. Someone near the booth identipresent tense. are processed, the language is Arabic, fies a track before the drop lands, quietly, and the dance floor never pauses to almost absentmindedly, like muscle A DJ in Amman citing critical theory is a left translate. “People might be dancing withturn in a list of influences. But if you grew memory. “We’re all figuring it out together,” out thinking about the meaning at all,” she up on Al Jazeera and your grandfather Keena says, “rather than trying to fit into says, “but the message still exists within had Edward Said on his bookshelves, the something that already exists.” the track.” logic feels immediate. Some people hear She opened for Keinemusik in an Umaa beat and leave it there. Others hear the It moves through bodies, through rooms, yyad-era winter palace outside Amman, entire political architecture surrounding it. through recommendation algorithms that electronic music ricocheting off have no idea what they’re carrying. eighth-century stone. The setting never tipped into gimmickry. The history altered It’s May now. The headphones are the the emotional temperature of the night same but summer is no longer a halluciitself. “Whether I like it or not, my sound nation. Somewhere, a man is ironing his is coming out of Amman because I am in linen shirt and warming up his pronunciaAmman,” Keena says. tion. The sound that found me in February on the Northern Line is transmitting now Spend long enough in Berlin, and eventufrom Amman, Los Angeles, and a stage ally the city enters the drums. The same on the Egyptian coast, carrying different is true of Amman. The difference is that memories in every direction. It finally has Amman still feels unresolved — creatively enough coordinates to call it home.

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words NADINE KAHIL

THE RETURN OF A LEGEND: B018 IS BACK IN BEIRUT All images courtesy of Bernard Khoury.

More than a nightclub, Bernard Khoury’s radical architectural landmark became a space where memory, music, resistance, and Beirut’s contradictions collided for countless generations.

Few spaces in the Middle East have shaped nightlife culture the way BO18 has.

For Beirutis, the club was never simply a place to dance. It was ritual. Memory.

Escape. Resistance. A place where architecture, music, and the city’s fractured identity collided under a retractable roof that opened to the sky just before sunrise.

Now, after years of closure, crisis, and uncertainty, BO18 is preparing to reopen once again, returning to Beirut at a time when the city continues to navigate political instability, economic collapse, and the long shadow of the 2020 port explosion. Yet BO18’s return feels larger than mere nostalgia. For many, it represents the revival of one of Beirut’s last true cultural landmarks — a space that never tried to imitate the city’s glamorous image, but instead confronted its scars directly.

“As Beirut was portrayed as the Switzerland of the Middle East, it did not necessarily want to show the very sour realities, the other side of the coin,” he says. “Karantina was sealed from the rest of the city by a wall that separated it.”

Rather than erase this history, BO18 was designed around it.

Founded by Naji Gebran, and originally designed by Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury, it opened in The club’s most radical gesture was not Karantina in 1998. It emerged during Beirut’s post-war what Khoury built, but what he refused reconstruction era, when much of the city was being to build. Instead of constructing a visible rebuilt through polished narratives of luxury and reinmonument along the highway, the archivention. Khoury rejected that language entirely. tect preserved the void itself. From the outside, BO18 appears almost invisible — “Back in the late 1980s, Beirut was represented in quite buried underground beneath a minimalist a sugar-coated manner, which was not necessarily steel structure that feels more industrial to my taste,” Khoury explains. “BO18 is an attempt to intervention than nightclub. acknowledge the dark chapters of our very complex recent past.”

“I certainly was not going to build a rhetorical mass visible on the highway negating The site itself carried enormous historical weight. Built this absence of building,” Khoury explains. on the site of a massacre that took place in Karantina in 1976, the project stood on land shaped by decades “The absence of building, if anything, makes the club more visible than if there of displacement, violence, and political erasure.

Before the Lebanese Civil War, Karantina had func- was a visible mass.” tioned as a quarantine zone near Beirut’s port before That confrontation between absence later becoming home to Armenian refugees, Palesand presence became central to BO18’s tinians, Lebanese displaced from the south, Syrians, mythology. Descending into the club and Kurds. For decades, it remained physically and always felt cinematic, almost ritualistic. socially separated from the rest of Beirut.

Inside, metallic tables resembled coffins, concrete surfaces felt deliberately raw, Khoury describes the district as a “black hole” within and the ceiling was capable of disappearthe city’s urban fabric — an absence that Beirut’s ing entirely. rapid development deliberately ignored.

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The retractable roof eventually became one of the most iconic architectural gestures in Beirut nightlife history. Near sunrise, the ceiling would slowly open, revealing the sky above exhausted dancers emerging from hours of music, sweat, smoke, and collective release.

But even this theatrical moment carried deeper meaning.

“The level where you sit and dance is in fact the exact topographical level of where the camps used to be,” Khoury explains.

“Opening the roof was an important gesture historically and conceptually. You are almost outside again, standing under the sky at the original level of the camp.”

For decades, BO18 became synonymous with Beirut’s underground spirit. Long before massive nightlife venues and international DJ circuits transformed the city in the 2000s and 2010s, the club cultivated something far more intimate and experimental. Music at BO18 resisted categorisation. Electronic sounds collided with obscure global genres, unexpected selections, and nights that felt more like sonic experiences than commercial parties.

“What was played at BO18 in the initial years was very unique, very pluralist,” Khoury recalls. “There were selections and types of music you wouldn’t hear in any club anywhere around the world.”

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“Your only way to survive here is to accept this complexity and resist.”

- Bernard Khoury

That radical openness shaped years of Beirut’s nightlife culture. BO18 became a rite of passage not only for club-goers, but for artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, architects, and creatives who saw the venue as one of the few spaces in the city where experimentation still felt possible.

Yet Khoury insists BO18 was never designed to chase popularity. “BO18 is not a trendy place,” he says. “It should never have been a trendy place.”

viewed the disappearance of spaces like BO18 as symbolic of Beirut losing fragments of itself. Entire cultural ecosystems collapsed under the weight of economic crisis, political paralysis, and mass emigration.

As Beirut’s nightlife industry expanded into larger commercial venues inspired by Yet BO18’s reopening arrives with a different energy. Less Ibiza, Berlin, and internanostalgic revival, more act of tional entertainment models, resistance. “Your only way to BO18 remained intentionsurvive here is to accept this ally small. The club’s scale complexity and resist,” Khoury — roughly 200 square metres says. “The mechanisms of — became part of its identity. survival that we all create are “This is a place purely to experwhat make this place very iment,” Khoury explains. “This interesting.” is not a place that should play the Arab world long before music everybody likes. We’re That resistance has always concepts like experiential defined Beirut’s nightlife not after that.” clubbing or underground culscene. Through wars, assasture became global branding That philosophy also explains sinations, blackouts, financial tools. It transformed trauma why the club struggled during collapse, and destruction, into architecture without turnits later years under differthe city has continuously ing suffering into spectacle. ent management. According returned to music, gathering, And it proved that nightlife to Khoury, BO18 drifted and nightlife not as escapism spaces could carry intellecaway from its original spirit, alone, but as forms of survival. tual, emotional, and historical attempting to compete with BO18 embodied that tension weight while still functioning large-scale nightlife operaperhaps more than any other as places of pleasure. tions instead of preserving its venue in the region. niche identity.

For younger generations who It was never polished. Never never experienced BO18 in Now, with the reopening led by easy. Never designed to flatits original era, the reopena group including Naji Gebter Beirut’s image. Instead, it ing offers more than a flash of ran’s son Amran, the goal is reflected the city’s contradiccuriosity. It offers access to a not reinvention, but restotions back onto itself. chapter of Beirut that shaped ration. the city’s creative identity for “Interesting cities are cities that “We’re rebooting BO18,” Khoury decades. have their own contradictions,” says. “We’re hoping to bring Khoury says. “Cities that are For Khoury, however, the back to the city, and hopefully difficult to frame.” essence remains simple. to the world, the BO18 that we More than twenty-five years all loved when it started.”

“It’s not designed to be a club,” after opening, BO18 remains he says. “It’s designed to be a The timing of its return feels one of the most radical space for celebrating music especially emotional. After the architectural and cultural and sound.”

Beirut port explosion devasspaces Lebanon has protated nearby neighbourhoods duced. It challenged what And in Beirut, few things have in 2020, many residents ever mattered more. nightlife could look like in

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THE HEATWAVE CULTURE ARTS BEAUTY FASHION

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interview and words SANDRA YEGHIAZARIAN

BVLGARI ENTERS THE BIENNALE WITH BOOKS, FIRE & PATRONAGE At the 2026 Venice Biennale, Bvlgari enters the field with a proposition about luxury patronage: one that links jewellery, restoration, contemporary art, education, craft, knowledge, and the cultural responsibility of a Roman house.

At the 2026 Venice Biennale, Bvlgari arrives with a proposition about what luxury patronage can mean today. In conversation with Sandra Yeghiazarian, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of YUNG, Matteo Morbidi, Managing Director of Fondazione Bvlgari, reflects on the Roman Maison’s new role as Exclusive Partner of the International Art Exhibition for the next three editions, beginning an association that will run through 2030. For its first chapter, Bvlgari is presenting a project by Lotus L. Kang in the Giardini, while Fondazione Bvlgari stages its first official collateral event at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana with Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda.

Monia Ben Hamouda, Fragments of Fire Worship, photo by T-Space, courtesy of Bvlgari.

The 61st International Art Exhibition, titled In already knew it wanted to be present in Minor Keys and curated by Koyo Kouoh, Venice. “The Venice Biennale is the most runs in Venice until 22 November. Against important Biennale for art, and also for that backdrop, Bvlgari’s presence traces architecture, in the world,” says Matteo a line between jewellery, patronage, his- Morbidi, Fondazione Bvlgari’s Managing tory, and artistic production. Founded in Director. The foundation began scoutRome in 1884, the Maison has long drawn ing locations early, aware that in Venice, from antiquity, architecture, colour, and everything is claimed years in advance. craft. In Venice, that legacy enters a con- The Marciana was the first place they vistemporary frame. The decision to stage ited. The search stopped there.

Fondazione Bvlgari’s first exhibition at “When you enter that space, you cannot the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana began think of something else,” Morbidi says. before the Maison’s partnership with the The reaction was immediate. The beauty Biennale had been formalised. Bvlgari

of the library, he recalls, left the team stunned. That first encounter set the tone for the project. On the same day, he met Stefano Trovato, director of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, a historian and academic whose support became central to the exhibition. Their conversation revealed a shared belief in the role of contemporary art within a historic institution. Trovato, he says, became “the fan number one of this project.” The choice of the Marciana gives the exhibition its intellectual frame. Founded on Cardinal Bessarione’s donation in 1469 and designed by Jacopo

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“What I would like to achieve is to concentrate on long-term projects with the goal to make things accessible and visible for future generations,” - Matteo Morbidi, Managing Director of the Fondazione Sansovino, the library is one of Venice’s great monuments to memory, preservation, and the transmission of knowledge.

Inside its Sale Monumentali, Fondazione Bvlgari brings together Lara Favaretto and Monia Ben Hamouda, two artists whose practices engage with language, archives, material traces, and the physical life of knowledge.

won the most recent edition of the MAXXI incredible job for seven, eight months.”

Bvlgari Prize and has since become, in From that mass of material, Favaretto the words of Morbidi, “sort of part of selected 2,700 volumes. “She examthe Bvlgari family.” The collaboration has ined each book,” Morbidi continues. “She extended beyond Venice: Bvlgari has selected each book one by one.” The worked with her on a fellowship at the level of attention extended to the instalAmerican Academy in Rome, and her lation itself: every book’s exact position sculpture Ya’aburnee (Untranslated Fragwas decided by the artist. Displayed on ment I) was installed in the garden of the a monolithic shelving structure in the Bvlgari Hotel Milano this April, remaining Monia Ben Hamouda opens the exhibition Salone Sansovino, the work becomes an on view for the duration of the Biennale with Fragments of Fire Worship, an instalarchive, a reading room, and an artwork Arte 2026. lation of two neon sculptures placed in arranged through months of contact, the Vestibolo. The works draw from the In the Salone Sansovino, Lara Favaretto handling, looking, and choice. artist’s relationship to calligraphy, shaped presents the seventh and final chapter Inside each volume, Favaretto has placed by her background as the daughter of of Momentary Monument – The Library. an image from her personal archive, an Islamic calligrapher. Writing becomes The scale of the project is immense. which she has been building since 1995. fragmented, luminous, and difficult to According to Morbidi, Favaretto began by “In each book, there is an image,” Morread. Language appears as trace, gesture, contacting universities, libraries, institubidi says. Those images create a second and mark. Fire enters as a force of revela- tions, academies, and collections across system within the library: an analogue tion and destruction, turning knowledge Italy, building an initial body of around hypertext made through association, into unstable matter.

12,000 books. “She started her selecfriction, chance, and memory. A book tion of books calling all the universities, all Ben Hamouda’s presence grows out of becomes a meeting point between text, the libraries in Italy,” he says. “She did an an existing relationship with Bvlgari. She image, institution, and artist. Inside the

Lotus L. Kang, Esedra, photo by T-Space, courtesy of Bvlgari.

Marciana, Favaretto turns the library into a living structure, placing preservation, circulation, access, and responsibility under pressure. The project will culminate in a publication by the artist.

The pairing of Favaretto and Ben Hamouda came after the location had been chosen.

“First of all, we selected the place,” says Morbidi. “Then we started to think about which kind of artists we could bring to this special place.” That order matters. The exhibition begins with architecture, history, and atmosphere, then asks which artistic voices can enter such a charged room with enough force to meet it.

Together, the two artists give the project its strongest form. Ben Hamouda works with language as rupture, light, inheritance, and fire. Favaretto works with the book as archive, system, and object in circulation.

Both are concerned with how knowledge moves through matter. In the Marciana, their works activate the library’s central questions: what survives, what is lost, what can be read again, and what happens when memory enters the present.

For Morbidi, the library’s role feels especially urgent now. “The library is really a place of memory, a place of culture, a place of history,” he says. Favaretto’s use of real books became essential to the project for that reason. “It is so important, especially in this specific time, to rediscover the library as guardian of the memory and of the past and of the culture.”

At Spazio Esedra in the Giardini, Bvlgari’s Biennale presence continues with a new commission by Lotus L. Kang, the Toronto-born artist known for installations that sit between photography, sculpture, and living material. Kang works with unfixed photographic papers, sensitive films,

organic forms, and processes of change. For Fondazione Bvlgari, the Biennale partnership is part of a larger commitment Her practice is concerned with inherto long-term cultural projects. Morbidi is itance, memory, impermanence, and clear about the foundation’s approach: transformation; materials shift, surfaces respond, and the work remains open to “We want not to have a spot sponsorship of a small project, but really invest in longtime. term projects,” he says. “Like this, like the For the Biennale, Kang’s project continues Biennale.” The same logic applies to the her interest in unstable forms. Her instalMAXXI Bvlgari Prize in Rome and the Mailations grow out of matter, light, exposure, son’s support of the Whitney Biennial in and environment, treating material New York. change as part of the work’s life. In the setting of the Giardini, where national his- That commitment also reaches back into history. Through the foundation, Bvlgari tories, institutional narratives, and artistic has been supporting the restoration of positions meet, Kang’s language feels the Torlonia Collection, one of Rome’s especially precise. She makes space for most important private collections of ambiguity without losing structure. ancient marble sculpture. The collection All this sits within the broader context of includes more than 600 works, and BvlFondazione Bvlgari’s growing cultural gari has so far supported the restoration role. Established in 2024, the foundaof 150 sculptures. For the foundation, restion expands the Maison’s work across toration and contemporary patronage contemporary art, historical restoration, belong to the same cultural project: preeducation, philanthropy, and the transserving what already exists while creating mission of savoir-faire. “It’s not an art conditions for new work to emerge. foundation, it’s a philanthropic foundation,” says Morbidi. Contemporary art is “What I would like to achieve is to concenpart of its programme, alongside histor- trate on long-term projects with the goal to make things accessible and visible for ical art, restoration, education, and craft future generations,” the Managing Direcknowledge. tor says. “It is the same value if you do a The creation of the foundation came from restoration project, if you restore the cola sense of responsibility. “Of course, we lection, if you support young artists, if you feel more responsibility,” Morbidi says. invest in the education of young children.

“This is also the reason why we decided It is really investing in the future and future to establish the foundation, because the generations, and making things visible foundation puts together, under an offiand accessible to everybody. This is the cial institution, a lot of activities that the mission of the foundation.”

Maison was doing in the past, and even before the family.” In Venice, that broader That idea also shapes his view of the role luxury brands should play today. “It is a mission becomes visible through conresponsibility for the luxury brand of today temporary art, while its logic reaches to support the cities where they are born, towards preservation, cultural continuity, support the monuments, support the and the structures that allow knowledge talents, the young talents,” Morbidi says. to be carried forward.

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Momentary Monument – The Library by Lara Favaretto, photo by T-Space, courtesy of Bvlgari.

For Fondazione Bvlgari, Venice is part of a larger cultural mission, ensuring visibility and accessibility for future generations.

The Face of Desire is Loss by Lotus L. Kang, photo by T-Space, courtesy of Bvlgari.

“They have to support these kinds of cultural projects.”

It is a view that feels particularly relevant at a time when luxury houses are increasingly present across art fairs, museums, foundations, and biennials. For Bvlgari, that cultural weight is tied to Rome, heritage, restoration, craftsmanship, and contemporary art. The Maison’s value extends beyond the object into the world that shaped it.

“I think only the brands that sell not only products, but values, history, heritage, craftsmanship, only the brands that give values to the customer can be the players of the future,” he says.

Asked who defines culture today - institutions, audiences, or artists - the Managing Director resists a single answer. “I think all of them,” he says. “It’s a mix, and the Biennale is a great example. The dialogue that the Biennale is able to create between the institution and the artists really makes culture today.”

That idea sits at the centre of Bvlgari’s Venice presence, the Maison enters the Biennale through sponsorship, commissions, restorations, a foundation, and artist-led projects, while the strongest gesture lies in the meeting between institution and artist. In the Marciana, books are handled, selected, placed, opened.

Language is fractured into light. Archives are made public again. At the Giardini, Kang allows materials to change over time. Across these projects, culture appears as something made collectively: by those who preserve it, those who challenge it, and those willing to give it space.

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words MAI EL MOKADEM

THE SUMMER OF SECOND STARTS In full bloom, on your own time.

Every summer brings the same pressure: the feeling that this is the moment your life is supposed to truly start. The season of visible skin, visible lives, visible milestones. Everything feels heightened under the weight of the solstice: the electricity ofof youth, the desperate pursuit of beauty, and the shimmering promise that this year, your transformation, your glow up, your reinvention will be complete.

The season is synonymous with youth, freedom, possibility, and the idea that life should be unfolding in full colour. But somewhere along the way, many of us begin treating our ambitions the same way we treat summer itself—as something fleeting. A narrow window. A season that can somehow pass us by.

In between the golden, honeyed light of the day and long, languid evenings, the pressure to be somewhere, become someone, clamours more than ever; that urge to prove that life is moving exactly on time, and not one second later. We are taught to chase speed, to fear delay, to believe that ambition belongs to the young and that every dream comes with an invisible deadline.

Never before have our timelines been so public.

Between ‘30 under 30’ lists, viral breakthroughs, and an endless stream of achievements displayed online, age has become one of the most misleading ways we measure achievement. We’ve become obsessed with the "right" timing—the idea that by a certain age, you should have already "made it." Between social media and constant comparisons, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind, racing against an invisible clock.

In this issue, we talked to artists, DJs, filmmakers, and creatives who prove that growth doesn't follow a schedule. Many of them didn’t find their rhythm until later in life, or they wholly reinvented their paths along the way. They’ve learned that the best things take time; much more time than we’re led to believe.

Let this be your reminder: life isn't a single, short season. There is no deadline for growth, no expiry date for success, and no age limit on ambition. And no such thing as missing your moment when you’re still willing to create one.

CHANTAL BROCCA RESEARCHER, STYLIST & ARTIST EGYPT, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Courtesy of Chantal Brocca.

Your season hasn’t passed.

Chantal Brocca refuses to play by the rules of a system she believes is fundamentally broken. To the Italian-Sri Lankan based between Dubai and Cairo, the modern obsession with timelines is a symptom of a culture that has replaced true substance with the frantic, weekly cycle of disposable consumption. "The world is flying at hyper-speed levels," she observes. "We are screaming for each other's attention to sell more plastic garbage. We are rushing like maniacs, but for what? We don’t need more—we need redistribution.

We have a massive perception problem."

For Brocca, the pressure to succeed is a trap—a carrot dangled by a society that values marketability over the soul. She challenges the very definition of the word, questioning why we so desperately chase the approval of "taste-makers" who care little for inherent value. "It’s so important to stop and think," she urges, "before we get caught in the net of this frantic madness."

This refusal to conform extends to the modern myth of the expiration date, which she views as a dehumanizing by-product of a system that measures people like assets on a balance sheet. "We are alive as long as we are alive," she says, dismantling the concept of retirement. "Expiry dates belong on perishable food labels—don’t make the mistake of treating yourself like an empty commodity."

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Instead, she advocates for a life built on the steady accumulation of depth. To Brocca, our worth isn't found in checking off boxes or reaching a final destination; it is found in the way our experiences, our relationships, and our unique understanding of the world compound over time. “Timeless works of great and enduring brilliance were produced in later stages of life, when creations could crystallise into their truest form."

To her, we are merely stewards of a larger, ongoing dialogue, carrying forward the torch of ideas that our ancestors spent entire lifetimes perfecting. These ideas are never truly "complete"— they are living, breathing things that we must sculpt, refine, and, when necessary, rescue from the modern impulse towards distortion.

To Brocca, the goal is to marvel, to wonder, and to enjoy life in ever-expanding orders of magnitude. The choice is yours, and she is clear about it: there is no time when you should decide to stop enjoying your own life. “We are inundated with technological innovations, scientific breakthroughs, data analytics from every pore from every species on the planet - what more could we possibly need for us all to be prosperous, cared for, happy and in peace?”

"What are you chasing?" she asks. "And if you’re not chasing, but discovering—exploring all of that infinite potential you hold inside, for the simple pleasure of truly getting to know who you are and what this great big beautiful universe is—then are you ever really 'done'?"

CHERIEN DABIS DIRECTOR, ACTOR & WRITER PALESTINE, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Photo by Stephanie Diani, courtesy of Cherien Dabis.

Courtesy of Chantal Brocca.

Cherien Dabis does not walk a straight line, and she never has — not even as a child. While others were busy imagining what they For years, she carried the heavy, external pressure to wanted to be, she was already preoccupied with a larger ques- "arrive" on a schedule. However, as the seasons turned, tion: why. “I was reading books like What Color Is Your Parachute? that cold ambition gave way to something warmer, at twelve, trying to understand what I was meant to do with my something more vital: the desire to contribute. "I don’t life", she shares. “Looking back, that was its own kind of timeline want to achieve for the sake of achievement," she pressure. Not about success, but about finding direction early says, her voice turning away from the noise of status and committing to it.” and toward the subtlety of impact. "I want to keep deepening my craft. I want to feel inspired. I want to Her search for purpose has followed her through every chapter of be part of a movement toward truth and justice." her life, from dance studios and film sets to writers’ rooms and directing chairs. Along the way, she has learned to distrust the It was this surrender to the process that allowed her timelines society hands us — the invisible deadlines attached to to bloom in her mid-30s. She finally turned toward success, ambition, and self-discovery. “I think ambition is overthe camera as an actor—a territory she had once rated. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised it’s not about ambition for avoided because she was too scared, too guarded, me — it’s about contribution.” too busy hiding her own reflection from herself. "In my teens and 20s, I avoided vulnerability like the plague," As the daughter of immigrants, achievement was never simply she reflects. about recognition. It was tied to security, responsibility, and the The worries of youth peeled away, leaving behind desire to make sacrifice mean something. Yet the path she ultisomeone who no longer feared the discomfort of mately chose — one built through storytelling, filmmaking, and being seen. She learned that to truly grow, one must creative risk — offered none of the guarantees she had been be willing to stumble. By embracing that vulnerataught to seek. To her, the arts were not a soft landing, but a disbility, she finally found the alignment between who ruption—a gamble on herself that transformed the sacrifices of she was and who she was meant to be. Her journey her past into a language of her own. shows that we are not racing against a clock; we are, She started in the arts with dance, and began ballet at twelve—a instead, unearthing the people we have been waiting point that, in the rigid world of classical training, felt impossibly for all along. late. Watching girls who had been practicing since they were toddlers, she convinced herself she had already missed her window.

That persistent, gnawing feeling of being "behind" fuelled her for

“I think ambition is overrated.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised it’s not about ambition for me — it’s about contribution.”

- Cherien Dabis

Courtesy of Cherien Dabis.

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“We’re always made to feel like our time is limited.

That has never changed, and I believe it never will—at least not until the robots take over and none of us matter at all."

— Jess

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Courtesy of Jess.

JESS DJ & PRODUCER EGYPT For Jess, the path to artistry was not a road she set out to travel, but one she eventually stumbled upon when the time was finally right. For years, her world was demarcated by the high-pressure, fastpaced rhythm of tech start-ups. Music, while always present, was relegated to the margins—a private sanctuary for her inner self. Success had a clear language there: lists, achievements, growth metrics, Having once chased—and achieved— the public validation of "25 under 25" and the constant pursuit of what came lists, Jess knows first-hand how seducnext. tive and hollow those milestones can be.

When she first began mixing in 2020, there She watched as those public accolades was no grand plan behind it. “It came slowly morphed into an invisible, ticking from sheer curiosity and a desire to clock, threatening to turn success into a express emotions through music,” Jess race against an expiration date. “At the recalls. From the calculated metrics of the time it felt like the biggest validation; I genstart-up world to the intuitive flow of the uinely felt on top of the world,” she unveils.

DJ booth, Jess found a lesson in patience.

“But what I didn’t anticipate was how She found resonance in the words of Julia those kinds of markers can slowly create Cameron, who wrote that creativity often a sense of expiration around success.” waits with grace until we are finally ready to listen. "It helped me understand that While DJing has become an integral part some things take their time to emerge," of her identity, she still speaks about hershe tells YUNG, "even when they fall self as someone in motion. Much of her outside the timelines we expect for our- creative journey now revolves around disselves." covering the producer and creator within her — the part that moves beyond interLooking back, Jess sees that timing as preting other artists’ work and begins a gift. Entering music later allowed her creating something entirely her own. to approach it without the pressure of “Creativity doesn't follow those timelines." expectation. She wasn’t trying to build a Rather than rushing that process, she’s career as much as she was following a allowing it to unfold naturally, embracfeeling. "Music is endless," she says, her ing experimentation, uncertainty, and the voice bright with the thrill of the hunt. unfamiliar territory of being a beginner "Every time I think I understand a genre or again. a certain sound, I discover another artist, “The poet Theodore Roethke once wrote, another influence, another direction that “We learn by going where we have to opens up something new." go.” I’ve always loved that line because it reflects how creativity actually unfolds,” she concludes. “It’s rarely one big breakthrough. It’s small discoveries that slowly reshape how you listen and create.”

Courtesy of Jess.

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Courtesy of Misty.

MISTY DJ & RECORD LABEL FOUNDER EGYPT For Misty, success has never been a finish line. It’s a series of milestones that keep moving forward, each one revealing another challenge, another idea, another version of himself still waiting to be discovered. "Success isn't a one-time achievement," he notes.

The Egyptian DJ, producer, and record label founder has been making music since 2011, but the sound people associate with him today didn’t arrive overnight. In fact, it took nearly a decade to find. While he spent years producing and experimenting, something always felt slightly out of reach. It wasn’t until the release of his Things EP in 2021 that everything finally clicked. The ten-year journey it took to find his "real" sound. “That’s the sound I still carry today,” he says.

Rather than viewing those years as time lost, Misty sees them as necessary groundwork. “It made me realize timing isn't late or early," he tells YUNG. "It just lands when it’s meant to." The countless hours spent refining his craft, testing ideas, and searching for authenticity ultimately gave him something far more valuable than early success: a creative identity.

Early on, ambition felt "loud"—a desperate, frantic need to prove something, to move fast, and to be seen. But over time, that noise has faded, replaced by something more focused, personal, and intent on impact. "It shifts," he explains. "It becomes less about the volume of your output and more about the meaning behind it."

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Balancing the demands of a 9-to-5 job with the creative pulse of music has taught him to treat his time as a precious resource—something to be guarded, not spent. When Misty loses that discipline, the anxiety of "falling behind" creeps back in. But he’s learned that consistency is the antidote to that fear, and curiosity to stagnation. Curiosity, to him, is what keeps artists evolving long after others become comfortable. It’s what pushes him to remain a student of music, constantly exploring sounds, ideas, and possibilities beyond his own boundaries.

Perhaps that’s why he remains sceptical of the timelines that dominate modern culture. Success, he believes, has little to do with age and everything to do with impact, consistency, and the work itself.

"The minute you forget timelines, that’s when you finally become at peace."

Even now, after years of building his career, he admits he still feels unfinished — in the best possible way. There are always more records to make, more ideas to bring to life, and more ground to explore.

In many ways, that feeling is what keeps the music alive. By staying focused on his own rhythm, he’s learned that there’s no pressure to win the race if you’re the one setting the pace.

NELLY ATTAR MOUNTAINEER SAUDI ARABIA / LEBANON Nelly Attar knows better than most that growth rarely happens at the summit.

Over the years, the Saudi-Lebanese athlete has built a reputation for accomplishing extraordinary physical feats (and being the first Arab woman to summit K2), but her relationship with success cannot be confined to mountains, records, or milestones.

A professional mountaineer who has spent her life conquering literal peaks, Attar views the societal pressure to "achieve by a certain age" as a form of artificial stress, amplified by a digital age that traps us in a loop of comparing our behind-thescenes to everyone else’s highlight reels.

"We get to define what success is," she says. "And whether that’s financial, athletic, or project-based, it belongs to you."

Attar’s life has been a series of deliberate re-alignments. Before becoming one of the region’s most recognised endurance athletes and adventurers, Attar studied psychology, worked in mental health, taught dance, opened her own studio, and later watched that chapter come to an abrupt end during the pandemic. Each reset, she discovered, wasn't a return to zero. It was an accumulation. "It’s never really starting from zero or scratch," she explains. "I come from a place of experience."

Courtesy of Nelly Attar.

That experience was forged in the fire of 2020—a year that brought the dual weight of closing her business and the grief of losing her father. It was her darkest rock bottom, yet it was the crucible that revealed her own reservoir of resilience. "It revealed to me how resourceful I can be," she reveals. "You will never be who you were before, but a new part of you emerges."

Today, Attar is in the midst of yet another transition.

She is shifting her focus from the solitary pursuit of her own summits to the broader mission of helping others navigate their own. She believes that in a world leaning towards convenience, the most revolutionary act is to seek out discomfort. "You stop evolving when you choose to stick to your comfort zone," she says. "If you stick to it too much, you don't just stay stagnant—you regress."

In fact, she resists the idea that success can be measured by age at all. Instead, she believes it is defined by impact: the lives we touch, the people we inspire, and the courage to keep evolving long after we think we’ve found our path. "You have not missed your window," she insists. "You don't need a revelation or something drastic to change. You can choose to change right now, as you are reading this. Anything that was meant for you will come—but you have to be the one to start."

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words MAI EL MOKADEM

WELCOME TO HOUSE OF HADER Ghady Hader wants you to sit inside the ambiguity.

"I personally never really connected to brands that only sold products. I never wanted House of Hader to feel like, ‘here’s a shirt, buy it’. I wanted it to feel like entering my mind.”

- Ghady Hader

Hader turns his back on the standard, transactional model of retail. We’re bombarded by thousands of products daily, but he believes the ones that actually linger aren’t just the ‘best’. “I personally never really connected to brands that only sold products,” he adds. “I want you to look at a table and think, ‘this fits my world.’ I sell an atmosphere.”

The name ‘House’ functions as a literal translation of Hader’s own mind. It is a space intended to invite the audience to step into a perspective they didn’t know they were missing. This philosophy took physical form in his recent installation, a project that intentionally disrupted the viewer’s routine.

For the project, Hader threw away the idea of a traditional launch. The creative artist introduced House of Hader through a live installation in Beirut where he placed himself inside a fully furnished glass room on a public street for five hours. Passers-by watched

him in real-time, pulling out their phones to search his name and try to make sense of what was happening.

“Beirut is a huge part of what shaped me creatively and personally,” he says. “I don’t think the installation would’ve carried the same emotional weight elsewhere.”

There was a point during the project’s first public installation where the audience itself became part of the artwork. Some stood silently observing. Others photographed every corner of the room. Some tried decoding the meaning behind specific objects, colours, or placements in real-time, while others simply looked confused, unsure whether they were witnessing a fashion launch, a performance piece, or something far more personal. “That range of reactions was the work,” he says.

For Hader, that uncertainty was intentional. “I wanted people to feel slightly unsure of what they were witnessing,” he tells YUNG. “Not in a shocking way, but more in a ‘what in the world is going on?’ kind of way.

A way that interrupts routine.”

The next day, that tension gave way to an immersive pop-up. A recreation of his own bedroom, the pop-up sidestepped “buying products” toward experiencing a world, an invitation to step inside his mind.

“Bedrooms are intimate spaces,” he says. “They hold versions of you no one has ever seen.”

By placing that intimacy into a public setting, the project created a strange collision between comfort and exposure, one that echoes the way digital culture already operates. Followers observe fragments of people’s rooms, routines, aesthetics, thoughts, playlists, and identities through curated screens every day. House of Hader simply translated that online behaviour into physical space. “The audience behaviour became the second half of the installation,” Hader says. “I basically brought that entire digital behaviour into a physical space.”

All images courtesy of House of Hader.

For most people, a brand is a product—a shirt to buy, a table to place in a room. For Lebanese creative Ghady Hader, though, a brand is an invitation into a private universe. The Beirut-based designer thrives in the grey area between fashion label, emotional universe, installation art, and archive. Although clothing exists within Hader’s world, he repeatedly resists reducing the project to fashion alone. To him, the clothes are simply one language within a much larger psychological environment.

Looking back, Hader views the inception of House of Hader as a subconscious pursuit that has been his life’s work. Before the project physically existed, Hader believes the world itself had already been forming unconsciously through years of visual experimentation, online presence, interiors, photography, music, styling, and internet documentation. At some point, he realised people were already associating a very specific emotional atmosphere with him online.

“That’s when it started feeling like a world I had already been living inside of privately for years.”

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For the audience, the experience became a puzzle to be decoded in real-time, a physical manifestation of the digital behaviour we all engage in when we stalk a profile or analyse a creator’s life. That intention feels central to understanding why the project resonates so deeply with younger audiences. “It made the act of observation feel much more real,” he says. “Almost invasive at times, but also more honest.”

House of Hader repeatedly forces people to confront the strange dynamics modern internet culture has normalized: watching strangers build themselves publicly, emotionally attaching to curated fragments of identity, and attempting to decode people through aesthetics alone. The installation simply externalised a behaviour that already exists online every day. “We live in a time where being seen is almost its own form of existence,” he says.

Hader understands modern branding not as advertising, but as long-term atmosphere building. The recurring palettes, recurring textures, recurring emotional atmospheres — all of it operates almost subconsciously. Hader speaks repeatedly about aesthetics as psychological conditioning, slowly immersing audiences into a recognisable emotional environment over time. “I like the idea that by the time people encounter the brand physically, they’ve already emotionally entered its world.” Months before officially announcing the brand, people were already sending him specific shades of blue and red saying they “felt like him.”

In many ways, House of Hader reflects a cultural shift happening across fashion and creative industries globally. Audiences no longer connect solely to products; they connect to people, emotional worlds, contradictions, and identities that feel lived-in. “I’m obsessed with making things feel intentional,” he says.

Looking at the broader creative scene, Hader sees both a wealth of talent in the Middle East and a significant gap. Too many projects, he observes, operate within safe visual formulas. He advocates for a shift toward the conceptual. “The global creative scene has become less about perfection and more about perspective,” Hader explains. “I want to see more conceptual thinking, more world-building, more commitment to ideas that might initially confuse people.”

When asked how he defines the brand, Hader offers no rigid answer—and that is by design. “I’ve personally never fit into one lane creatively, so I wouldn’t want my brand to, either,” he says. “I’ve tapped into acting, music, podcasting, jewellery, graphic design, photography—all of it. As long as it’s engaging and people are connecting to it, that’s exactly where I want it to exist.”

“Some of the most impactful art pieces still can’t be fully explained, but they make people feel something specific that stays with them.”

- Ghady Hader

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That commitment to ambiguity is what makes House of Hader feel like an ongoing emotional experiment. Hader himself resists clearly labelling what the project actually is, largely because he sees that categorization as limiting. “The point is that it doesn’t need to be defined,” he says.

As the project grows from a personal creative outlet into a business, Hader is careful to maintain the intimacy that birthed it. He acknowledges the irony: the brand was born in the solitude of his bedroom, yet it now relies on a public, shared experience. “I never wanted House of Hader to feel like, ‘here’s a shirt, buy it,’” he explains. “I wanted it to feel like entering my mind.”

In the end, House of Hader is a testament to the idea that if you build your own world with enough conviction, others will eventually want to walk through the door. While House of Hader appears visually meticulous, it is a world still actively becoming itself. Again and again, he returns to the idea that understanding is less important than feeling. “Some of the most impactful art pieces still can’t be fully explained,” Hader adds. “But they make people feel something specific that stays with them.”

It’s perhaps why House of Hader feels unusually personal even when it remains abstract. The project never fully explains itself, yet still manages to feel intimate. That contradiction — being both revealing and withholding at once — mirrors the internet identities many people construct for themselves now. “The brands that stay with us emotionally always felt like worlds you could step into,” he reveals. “People want meaning, tension, identity, community, and perspective.”

Because ultimately, the project isn’t really interested in clothing alone. It’s interested in what visibility does to people psychologically. What happens when personal identity becomes public consumption? What happens when audiences emotionally invest themselves into worlds they only partially understand?

And how much intimacy can still exist once observation becomes constant?

Rather than answering those questions directly, House of Hader seems to intentionally live inside them. “As long as it’s fun, engaging, and people are connecting to it emotionally,” Hader reveals, “that’s exactly where I want it to exist.” He asks audiences to sit inside ambiguity, discomfort, curiosity, and tension without immediately resolving them. Not because they fully understand the world Ghady Hader is building — but because somewhere inside it, they recognize pieces of the way they already experience visibility, identity, and longing themselves.

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words MARIANA BAIÃO SANTOS

THE STUDIO IN THE Myriame Dachraoui, Nostalgia for a place I have never been, 2026. Oil on canvas, 152x102 cm, photography courtesy of Gallery 44.

SUITCASE

Ramzi Mallat, Billow and Behold, 2023. Glass and resin, dimensions variable, exhibited at Project Loop, London, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Project Loop. Photography by Noah Da Costa.

Basmah Felemban, The Eleventh View of Time, 2022.

Video projection on floating screen , 7-22 minutes.

Across cities, languages, and individual routines, four artists navigate what it means to build a creative life far from home — while carrying fragments of it everywhere.

A studio key in one city, a family lunch in another, pigments packed into bottles, a farmhouse near Mahis, a sea-facing routine in Tunis, a laptop carrying a practice between Jeddah and Margate, a Beirut memory edited from London until it begins to fracture.

For four artists working across London, Amman, Jeddah, Margate, Beirut and Tunis, the in-between enters through the things that structure a life before they structure the work. This is a creative life shaped by language, rent, land, ritual, inheritance, access, distance, and the question of what can travel with the body, what has to be re-made elsewhere, and what keeps pulling the work back towards home.

Raya Kassisieh, Courtesy of the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art.

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Courtesy of the Saudi Arabia Museum of Contemporary Art.

Raya Kassisieh moves between London & Amman through language, land, inheritance and solitude — building work shaped as much by distance as belonging.

Raya Kassisieh is learning how to make friends, language, land and the demands a place or culture. She calls it a privia room behave like land. After years of of connection. Those demands can lege. The work carries where she is from making in relation to outdoor space, ter- exhaust her, but they also feed the work. because she carries it. rain, garden and site, she is now settling At the farmhouse in Mahis, surrounded by When asked whether the work belongs into her first official studio in London. Four a garden, materials and another measure to a particular place, she corrects the walls. A commute. A five-day working of time, the distance between making premise. “I think my work comes from a week. She finds the structure oppresand resting almost disappears. particular place rather than belongs to sive conceptually, but useful physically. It Language sits close to the centre of her one.” Belonging can become a trap, a gets her to the studio. Once there, the day practice. Arabic is not only a mother demand for proof. Coming from somebegins to loosen. tongue, but something she is still learning where is older, stranger, harder to shake.

Kassisieh lives between London and how to inhabit critically. English, the lan- Kassisieh’s work emerges from that force: Amman, though Amman carries a differ- guage in which she often writes, offers from Amman’s archives and London’s solent weight. It is home, motherland, family, fluency and access, but it also carries itude, from a farmhouse in Mahis and a archive, language, garden, obligation, studio with four walls, from language as the discomfort of a colonised mind. She inheritance. It is where the work comes something spoken, inherited and worked notices how her body changes between from, even when the work is made elsethrough the body. languages, where sound comes from, where. “Home is the source, the gear who she becomes in each tongue. churner, the power,” she says. For an artist The body, in Kassisieh’s world, is never working through fibres, metals, natural separate from territory. She speaks of forms and heritage objects, home is not land, rare earth, minerals, pigments, natusimply a subject. It is pressure. ral fibres: an entangled world of materials London gives her solitude, privacy and whose meanings shift across context. distance. Amman is denser: full of family, She does not feel pressured to represent

Ramzi Mallat approaches London and Beirut through fracture, mythology and mistranslation — where memory distorts, symbols destabilise, and distance reshapes the emotional logic of home.

Ramzi Mallat needs an idea to haunt him before it becomes a work. In London, where he currently lives, he treats the studio less as a site of output than a place to process. Reading is constant. Books, essays, poems, articles: references accumulate until an image, object or symbol begins to demand his attention.

Beirut works differently. When he returns, longing gives way to anxiety, grief and survival mode. The city makes abstraction difficult. Each flight in and out of Lebanon now marks a shrinking map, with parts of the country made less reachable by ongoing hostilities. That produces helplessness, and guilt.

Sometimes, he says, he will spend days researching a single object or tracing the genealogy of a symbol before making anything at all. His practice is built around objects that carry too much history to behave cleanly: talismans, devotional signs, domestic rituals, oral traditions, folk symbols, food moulds, glass, metal, ceramic. In his hands, these materials refuse neat inheritance.

What he carries from home is a distrust of permanence. Lebanon, he says, teaches you that institutions, borders, economies and memory are fragile constructions.

That instability enters the work materially.

Organic traces are preserved when they should decay. Glass and ceramic appear solid while remaining breakable. Metals suggest endurance while oxidising and eroding.

Mallat lives between London and Beirut, and that division has changed the emotional engine of the work. Moving to London and becoming a diasporic artist was, in his words, “deeply jarring”. It replaced proximity with analysis. From London, Lebanon becomes montage: fragments, ruptures, heightened images, missing pieces. Distance sharpens memory, but it can also produce fictions.

His short film Sobhiye, shot in Lebanon and edited in London, made this condition explicit. Thinking through Artavazd Peleshyan’s idea of distance montage, Mallat approached Lebanon’s social fabric through rupture and recurrence: inherited mythologies, sectarian performance, unresolved mourning. Displacement, for him, changes the tools of seeing.

London has also made him aware of how Middle Eastern identity circulates culturally: through conflict, trauma, resilience, simplification. He resists the expectation that an artist from the region must become an ethnographer of himself, translating Lebanon into a digestible cultural lesson. His work is rooted in Levantine lore, but refuses the burden of coherence.

This is where mistranslation becomes central, Mallat is interested in opacity and interference, the point at which a viewer has to confront the limits of their own understanding. A talisman may read as protection, anxiety, envy or surveillance to someone who grew up around it.

For Mallat, being “in between” is no longer temporary. It has become a method: a way of working from ambiguity, contradiction and unstable symbols, without forcing the work to resolve what history has left unresolved.

Ramzi Mallat, Aporia, Installation View, exhibited At Project Loop, London, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Project Loop. Photography by Noah Da Costa.

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Basmah Felemban works between Jeddah and Margate through portability, code and adaptation — where language, faith and digital systems become tools for survival, translation and return.

Basmah Felemban, 'Fantasies of the End' Print transfer, natural pigment gouache, ballpen on gessoed plywood 158 x 220 cm.

Basmah Felemban’s studio fits in a suit- “real and grounded”, a place that makes Distance, for her, does not make Jeddah case. Not metaphorically, though the her write, think and produce with internal abstract. When she misses it, she goes metaphor is tempting. Her pigments intensity. Margate gives her painting, sea back. The city remains “dreamy, alive, travel in small bottles. Her brushes are views and stranger dreams. London, she and humid”. Its name, she notes, means edited down to the six or ten she reaches says, is the void. “We just don’t click, my grandmother, and the city lives up to it: for most. Her heat-reactive pens, laptop wheels don’t turn there.” changed, but somehow still itself. Like the and pen-plotting machines allow drawcatfish that appear in her work, morphFor a while, the back and forth was a probings and paintings to be broken into parts, ing to meet their environments, Felemban lem. Large works intended for exhibition in then reassembled into larger works. The imagines adaptation without invasion. the Gulf often had to be produced locally point is practical, but it has become philBelonging becomes something active, rather than shipped from Margate, which osophical too. A life split between Jeddah something made again and again. meant digital renders, sketches, producand Margate has forced her to ask what a ers, admin, compromise. By 2023, she had Her curatorial work extends that ethic work needs in order to survive transit. changed the scale and timing of what outward. At Villa Hegra, she develops Born in Jeddah, Felemban has built a prac- she accepted. The work became modular. programmes for AlUla’s local commutice around systems: linguistic, spiritual, Packing and unpacking became part of nity, building networks, databases and digital, ecological. Before art school, she the thinking. The portable studio became points of contact. In Saudi, the gesture was a self-taught graphic designer, and a boundary, not a concession. matters, and so does who understands it. that training still shows. Her works often Some forms of subversion, she says, work Home enters the work through faith and feel designed before they become physithrough cultural telepathy: a nod, a metatribe. Language enters more deeply still. cal, as if image, code, language and object phor, a message left hanging in the air for Felemban grew up with Qur’anic interpreare stages in the same act of translation. those who know how to read it. tation and the deconstruction of meaning At the moment, her life is divided between running alongside memorisation. She Felemban’s practice belongs, finally, to Jeddah, where her career and family are speaks about language as code, ecology, the place that can keep up with her: based, and Margate, where domes- force. Ibn Arabi’s “letters tree”, the idea the laptop. It travels, stores, translates, tic maintenance expands to fill the day. that letters carry the order of the universe, remembers. From there, the work can be In both places, her geography is small. sits close to the way she builds worlds. plotted, packed, unfolded and sent back Coffee shop, corner shop, home. Jeddah Text becomes a source system, transinto the world. is where she feels consequence. It is lated into image, sculpture, puzzle, spell.

Myriame Dachraoui’s life is split between speed and saltwater, between London’s meetings and introductions and the Tunis studio where sea, forest, pets and painting set the terms of the day.

them. Tunis enters as an old, layered city, full of history, culture, sea light and inherited stories.

from that: the brightness of Tunisian landscapes, the visual temperature of a place missed before it is fully understood as missing.

She does not fully relate to the idea of diaspora. She grew up and studied in Since being in London, she has also felt a stronger pride in North African culTunis before life brought her to London. ture. Maghrebi identity, she says, can be Her relationship to movement is pracdifficult to carry in certain geographies. tical, lucky, occasionally confusing, and London has made her more confident, increasingly productive. London gives her more curious, more willing to share the momentum. Tunis gives her ground. values and narratives she comes from.

Home enters Dachraoui’s work through colour, story and cultural memory. She When asked what being in between means now, Dachraoui answers with gratitude speaks about Tunisian people carrybefore confusion. Mobility is a privilege, ing centuries of different cultures, myths, especially when coming from the Global languages and religions without always South, where movement is never equally realising it. At some weddings, she notes, available. Her paintings do not depend on brides still perform gestures linked to being made in one place. Still, they carry ancient Phoenician rituals associated Tunis in their colour, heat, old symbols and with Tanit. That kind of survival interests rebuilt rooms. her: a symbol moving through time inside a celebration, still present in the body before it is named as history.

Distance has made her more aware of what Tunis gives her. During her Gallery44 residency in February, she felt homesick, and the paintings she made carried the energy of Tunis back into the London studio. The colours, she says, may come

In London, Tunisian painter is pulled into meetings, introductions, openings, conversations, the acceleration of a city where one person always seems to lead to another. This winter, during a residency with Gallery44 in Primrose Hill, London also gave her a temporary studio, a house in which to think about the emotional charge of interiors. The resulting exhibition, These Walls That Protect Us, moved through home as refuge, boundary and psychological space.

Tunis is different. Her studio is there, and so is the larger part of her production. She works and lives near the sea, close to the forest and a historic centre, in a neighbourhood that gives her access to a life she does not have to over-explain. Seven or eight hours painting. Close friends.

Pets. A simpler, more hedonistic routine.

For Dachraoui, that is enough.

Born in Tunisia and trained as an architect, Dachraoui makes paintings that often carry the logic of built space without becoming literal architectural studies.

Buildings, landscapes, rooms and fragments of place appear in her work as atmospheres with memory attached to

Myriame Dachraoui, 'Big calm', 2024 Oil on canvas 110x110 cm, Photography courtesy of Selma Feriani Gallery.

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words NADINE KAHIL

RIDING THE UNEXPECTED From Beirut to Dubai, the Middle East’s surf scene is no longer a secret, it is building momentum, community, and a new kind of cultural wave.

Courtesy of Lena Allam.

Surfing in the Middle East was never supposed to make sense. A region more associated with desert heat than rolling swells has quietly, and steadily, built a surf culture that stretches across coastlines, cities, and generations. What once felt like a hidden subculture is now finding rhythm, carried by a growing community that refuses to wait for perfect conditions.

Lebanon is often where the story begins.

“Surfing in Lebanon is not new to the 2000s,” explains Ali Elamine, founder of Surf Lebanon and President of the Lebanese Surfing Federation. “It’s been documented back in the 1960s and 1970s… the idea of managing waves has been part of our culture for hundreds of years.”

What has changed is not the presence of waves, but the people chasing them.

From a handful of windsurfers transitioning into surfing in the early 2010s, Lebanon now fields international teams, competing across Asia and slowly creating for themselves a place on the global stage. The journey has not been easy, shaped by instability, funding challenges, and the realities of the region. Yet, the persistence of surfers continues to redefine what is possible.

On another coast, Dubai tells a different version of the same story. What began

as an experiment has turned into infrastructure, community, and identity. “The Surf House started with a simple idea — create a home for surfers in a place that didn’t really have a defined surf culture,” “The UAE is moving from being a fringe surf location to a legitimate hub for the sport says Scott Chambers, founder of Surf in the Middle East,” Chambers adds.

House Dubai. “For us surfing is the best sport in the world… it’s the most fun you And yet, the appeal of surfing here goes can have in nature.” beyond infrastructure. It is about contradiction. Surfing in the Middle East is about From Chambers’ Wearly days with three boards strapped to a borrowed car in chasing something that does not always 2005 to a full ecosystem of training, travel, exist, about waiting, adapting, and finding and lifestyle, Dubai’s surf scene reflects moments of stillness in environments that how quickly the region can evolve when are constantly shifting. It is about commuaccess meets curiosity. Today, surfing in nity as much as it is about sport. the UAE is no longer niche. It is accessible, The surfer in this region does not fit a single inclusive, and growing. profile anymore. “It’s locals and long-term Across the Middle East, that growth is residents. It’s families and younger gentaking different forms. Oman’s raw erations. It’s people discovering surfing coastlines, Saudi Arabia’s investment here for the first time,” says Chambers. in wave technology, Kuwait’s emerging This is where the culture is changing fastest, competitors, and Egypt’s Red Sea surfin who gets to belong. ers all contribute to a fragmented but connected landscape. Wave pools, com- To understand that shift, we spoke to five petitions, and government backing are surfers from across the region, each navaccelerating the shift, turning what was igating their own version of the same once seasonal and uncertain into some- wave. From Lebanon to Dubai, Saudi to thing more consistent.

Kuwait, their stories move between challenge and freedom, between limitation and possibility.

They answered the same questions, but no two journeys sound alike.

What connects them is simple: the pull of the ocean, and the belief that even in the most unexpected places, a wave is always worth chasing.

LENA ALLAM, LEBANON & UAE Lena Allam’s relationship with surfing began as an idea before it became a reality. Growing up in Lebanon, the sport wasn’t widely visible, but something about it stayed with her, “What started with watching Lilo & Stitch as a kid became my first glimpse into a sport that would later become a big part of my life.”

Finding her way into surfing required persistence. Chasing waves along the Lebanese coast, navigating inconsistent conditions, and learning through experience shaped her connection to the ocean. “You learn to wait for the right conditions… to make the most of short windows when everything finally comes together.”

That process built more than skill. It built resilience, “Surfing humbles you and builds patience, discipline, and a kind of commitment that stays with you,” she says.

For Allam, the sport also became personal. A way to process loss, reconnect with herself, and find grounding. “It offered me a place where I feel the most grounded… and helped me find strength again.”

Courtesy of Lena Allam.

Today, based in Dubai, her relationship to surfing continues to evolve. With fewer natural waves, she turns to wave pools, part of a new reality shaping the region’s surf culture.

“The emergence of wave pools is a real game changer… opening access to waves where there was little to none.”

From Lebanon’s raw coastline to Dubai’s engineered waves, Allam’s journey reflects a broader shift, one where surfing is no longer defined by geography alone, but by determination.

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ALFRED BADR, LEBANON

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Courtesy of Alfred Badr.

Alfred Badr moves between worlds as a graffiti competitor, and one of the defining figures of Lebanon’s surf scene. Born in Beirut and raised in Côte d'Ivoire, his relationship with the ocean began early, long before surfing in Lebanon had structure or visibility. “I caught my first wave at nine, and that feeling never left me. I’ve been chasing it ever since.”

What started as curiosity quickly became something deeper. Surfing, for Badr, was never just about the image. “At first it looked cool, it felt like freedom… but once I caught my first wave, it became something else.” That shift from fascination to commitment still defines how he approaches both surfing and life.

In Lebanon, surfing comes with unpredictability. The swells are inconsistent, the system is still developing, and progress often depends on individual effort. Yet that is exactly what shaped the culture. “It’s a small scene, but it’s proud, competitive, and very self-driven.

And that’s what makes it special,” he says.

For Badr, surfing today is less about chasing waves and more about what those moments represent, “It keeps me grounded, it keeps me sane. Surfing is a lot of work for very few moments, but those moments are so rewarding that they make everything worth it.”

That mindset extends into his ambitions. Competing at the Asian Surfing Championships, pushing his physical limits, and mentoring younger surfers are all part of the same goal: to raise the level of surfing in Lebanon and ensure it continues beyond his generation.

OMAR EL SOBKY, EGYPT Omar El Sobky’s journey into surfing didn’t begin in Egypt, it began on the East Coast of the United States in 2007. But it is in Egypt where his story truly unfolds.

“I fell in love with the sport instantly… I travelled back to Egypt with a board and started exploring our beaches.”

At the time, there was no roadmap. No surf schools, no forecasts, no clear idea of where to go. “It took us years to figure it out through trial and error.” That process of discovery shapes not only his approach to surfing, but his role in building the sport locally.

What drew him in was more than the lifestyle. It was something almost intangible. “Surfing is one of the few sports where you ride energy… each wave is unique and there are so many different waves that you cannot try in one lifetime.”

That idea of energy, of constant movement and change, became central to his identity. “Surfing is more than a sport for me, it’s who I am and what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.”

In 2010, El Sobky founded Egypt’s first surf school, turning a personal passion into collective growth. Today, the country’s surf culture is evolving, supported by a growing community and formal structures beginning to take shape.

His focus now is on the future. Building a generation of younger surfers, developing infrastructure, and introducing wave pools are all part of a long-term vision.

“We need to attract younger surfers and develop them to international standards… this can take up to a decade, but we have the tools to do so,” he says.

Courtesy of Omar El Sobky.

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Courtesy of Mohammad Sultan bin Mejren.

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MOHAMMAD SULTAN BIN MEJREN, UAE For Mohammad Sultan bin Mejren, surfing began far from home. A trip to San Diego in 2011 introduced him to the sport, and with it, a completely new way of engaging with the ocean. “From that moment, I was hooked, without even knowing that waves existed back home in Dubai.”

Raised in a family connected to the sea through fishing and freediving, surfing felt like a natural extension. “It gave me a new way to stay connected to the ocean,” he explains.

Today, that connection defines his relationship to the sport. “Surfing is not just a sport for me, it’s something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. It keeps me physically strong, mentally balanced, and genuinely happy.”

In the UAE, surfing is still developing, but the pace of growth is undeniable. Between Surf House Dubai, wave pools like Surf Abu Dhabi, and the formation of the UAE Surfing Committee, the sport is becoming more structured and visible.

Bin Mejren is part of that evolution, both as an athlete and as someone actively shaping the scene. “My goal is to promote surfing and grow the sport, especially among Arabs and Emiratis… if I can do it, others can too.”

Courtesy of Mohammad Sultan bin Mejren.

Competing internationally and contributing to the national team, his role goes beyond personal progression. It is about representation, visibility, and building something that did not previously exist.

RMAS ALHAZMI, SAUDI ARABIA Rmas Alhazmi belongs to a generation shaping surfing in Saudi Arabia as they guide the sport’s early steps.

Discovering surfing at an early stage of its development in the region, her experience is defined by building something from the ground up rather than stepping into an established culture. “What existed was a small group of us forming a team… united by a shared love for the ocean,” she says. “At the time, it was difficult to see what the future would look like, but there was always a sense that it carried a deeper purpose.”

That early phase came with challenges, particularly around consistency. Without regular access to waves, progress required creativity and persistence.

“I even found myself trying to replicate surf training in public gyms in Jeddah, often getting very confused looks,” she explains. In order to improve she travelled, adapted, and stayed connected to the sport despite limited resources.

Today, that landscape is shifting. Wave pools and growing interest are slowly reshaping access across the region. “I receive messages almost daily from a younger generation who are curious and excited,” she says. “It’s real.” What was once niche is becoming visible, attracting surfers from different backgrounds and forming a community that feels open and collaborative.

Courtesy of Rmas Alhazmi.

As a female surfer, Alhazmi is conscious of the role she plays in that evolution. “There is a strong sense of responsibility to help shape the space early on… to make it feel accessible for more women and young girls.”

For her, surfing is also about perspective. “Being in the water is very cinematic… you think in moments, light, framing, and movement.” It is one of the few spaces where time slows, where connection happens naturally between waves, she says.

Courtesy of Rmas Alhazmi.

Looking ahead, her focus is simple. “As the scene grows, I hope we don’t lose the community… the openness that allows people to try, fail, and try again without judgment.”

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words MARIANA BAIÃO SANTOS

THE VENICE BIENNALE OPENS IN KOYO KOUOH’S KEY The 61st Venice Biennale opened with Koyo Kouoh everywhere and nowhere.

Her name was on the walls, in the catalogue, in the press material, in the routes through the Arsenale and the Giardini. Her thinking moved through the exhibition in fragments: a threshold, a place to sit, a shrine, a school, an indigo banner, a procession of works gathered from artists she had known, studied, argued for and travelled towards. Yet her body was absent. No final walkthrough, no press conference, no last-minute decision made under the heat of Venetian panic, no moment of arrival after the years of building that had brought her to the centre of the art world’s most powerful recurring exhibition.

Koyo Kouoh, photo by Mirjam Kluka.

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Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. As a teenager, she moved to Zurich, where her mother had settled years earlier. At first, her professional life was far from art. She studied economics, worked in banking, and entered a world built around profit and calculation. She left it for culture, writing, cinema, artists, and the political life of images.

In the mid-1990s, she travelled to Senegal as a cultural correspondent to interview filmmaker Ousmane Sembène.

Dakar changed her life. It became one of her intellectual homes, and later the site of one of her most important contributions to contemporary art. In 2008, she founded RAW Material Company, a centre for art, knowledge, and society.

RAW became an exhibition space, a residency, a school, a publishing platform, a One year after her death, In Minor Keys place for gathering, and a model for artopened under her name. The exhibition carries the strange weight of a life interist-centred institution-making. rupted in the middle of its most public Many of the ideas that would later appear chapter. What happens when the curain Venice had already been tested there: tor is gone, but her choices remain? What learning as practice, conversation as happens when the artists are waiting, the structure, art as civic imagination, and title exists, the team has been chosen, an institution as something built through the architecture is taking shape, and the trust. person who made the vision possible is no longer there to see it through?

Then came May 2025. Kouoh had been travelling for work when she began feelFor Venice, the story began in Deceming weak. During a trip to Senegal, she ber 2024, when La Biennale di Venezia went to see a doctor and had an MRI announced Kouoh as curator of the 2026 scan. When she arrived back at the airInternational Art Exhibition. The appointport in Basel, she cried as she told her ment made her the first African woman husband that she had good news and to lead the Biennale, and only the second bad news. The good news was that she African-born curator after Okwui Enwezor. did not have lung cancer, as Kouoh was Venice had spent more than a century a heavy smoker. The bad news was liver claiming the world while taking its time to cancer. hand its central exhibition to an African Within days, she was gone. She was 57, woman. only a few months into the role she had By then, Kouoh had built institutions, led wanted for years, and ten days away from museums, curated exhibitions across presenting the title and theme of the continents, and helped shape the way Biennale to the world.

African and diasporic contemporary art was seen, written about, collected, and Her husband assumed the exhibition argued about. Venice was her dream, would be cancelled. Instead, Biennale according to her husband, Philippe Mall, president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco wrote a Swiss saxophonist. She had always to Mall and to Kouoh’s son, Djibril Schmed, said that curating the Biennale’s central explaining that he wanted to continue the project. They agreed. Mall later said he exhibition was the goal. “Do that, then trusted her team.

I’m finished,” he recalled. The sentence now carries a charge no one could have The question became brutal in its simplicity. wanted.

Who carries a Biennale when the curator dies before it opens?

Chris Levine, Higher Power, San Clemente Palace, photography by Pete Huggins.

Kouoh had already chosen the people who would have to answer. Her team was made up of five figures: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Hélène Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi.

They were spread across London, Dakar, Berlin, Beirut, Marseille, Cape Town, and New York. Each held a different part of the exhibition’s structure: advising, editing, research, institutional memory, artistic dialogue.

The decisive moment had taken place in Dakar in April 2025, one month before her death. Kouoh gathered the team at RAW Material Company for an intense week of work. Around a mango tree, they moved through the artists, the works, the references, the possible forms of the exhibition.

They mapped affinities. They identified motifs. They clarified the rhythm of the show. Rasha Salti later compared the memory of that week to a rehearsal for a musical performance. Kouoh, she said, was “our conductor.”

On the final day, Kouoh gave each person a mission. After her death, that week became a compass. Every decision had to answer to what Kouoh had already set in motion. Every adjustment carried a question of fidelity. The team was not preserving a finished object, they were carrying a method. Kouoh’s own practice made that possible, she saw herself, in one of her mottos, as a midwife for artists: someone who helped bring the work forward while keeping the artist in front.

In Minor Keys brings together 110 participants: artists, duos, collectives and artist-led organisations. Among them are Wangechi Mutu, Alvaro Barrington, Nick Cave, Otobong Nkanga, Kader Attia, Godfried Donkor, Sammy Baloji, Alice Maher, Theo Eshetu, and many others whose practices move across sculpture, painting, film, installation, performance, textiles, archives, ritual and social space.

The title suggests a change in register.

Kouoh’s own statement asked the viewer to shift to a slower gear and tune into the frequencies of minor keys. Her invitation was to reconnect with what she called art’s natural habitats: the emotional, the visual, the sensory.

The exhibition unfolds through recurring forms: shrines, oases, schools, processions, thresholds, enchantment.

The shrines give space to guiding figures, the oases create pauses inside the exhibition, the schools point to artist-led models of learning, transmission and collective study, the processions bring movement and gathering into the structure of the show. Rest becomes part of the curatorial argument, a place to sit is a place to look.

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Among the works to seek out, Otobong ting through the lagoon night under the says “somehow her spirit spoke.” In an Nkanga’s presence near the entrance of phrase “make light, not war.” exhibition shaped by listening, frequency, the Central Pavilion sets a tone of mategrief, hope and transcendence, Higher For Levine, Higher Power is part of a wider rial memory, land, offering and mourning.

Power seemed to catch a signal already series, with Venice becoming its latest Wangechi Mutu brings the hybrid body moving through Venice. iteration. Its title points to a belief in higher into a field of myth and survival. Nick Cave realms, vibrations and dimensions of At the Austrian Pavilion, Florentina Holzingadds another register of performance, reality. er’s Seaworld Venice has become the armour, sound and protection. Godfried edition’s most divisive performance enviDonkor draws histories of empire, boxing, The beam is the result of decades of ronment, full of water, bodies, opera, circus, saints and Black diasporic image-making working with lasers. For Venice, Levine absurdity and bodily risk. Lubaina Himid’s into Venice. Sammy Baloji’s crystal-stud- collaborated with engineers in Germany British Pavilion carries the weight of hisded bronzes return historical forms who modified high-power industrial infratory, migration and translation through through mineral memory and colonial red lasers to produce visible light. He sees painting and sound. Chiara Camoni’s Italextraction. Alice Maher’s sibyls and floatthe laser as a pure form of energy, tied ian Pavilion turns to matter, nature, objects ing heads bring prophecy, humour and to frequency, vibration and the idea that and shared making. India’s Geographies unease. Theo Eshetu’s olive tree turns human beings are “beings of light.” Oscilof Distance: remembering home brings heartbreak into a moving centre of gravity. lated at 432Hz, a tone associated with together artists working through memory, healing, the work became a signal as Beyond the central exhibition, the Bienarchitecture, thread, ecology and sculpmuch as an image. nale’s most talked-about moments tural form. Estonia’s Merike Estna has stretch across the city. Chris Levine’s Levine wanted his creation to be read as art, filled her pavilion with glazed ceramic tiles Higher Power, a green laser halo pronot as a technological stunt. The Biennale and an evolving studio-like environment. jected above San Clemente Island during gave it an audience already tuned to conBvlgari’s presence, through Lotus L. Kang opening week, gave Venice one of its temporary art, but the timing changed its in the Giardini and a Fondazione Bvlgari most visible images: a beam of light cut- charge. He never met Kouoh, though he collateral event with Lara Favaretto and

"The Biennale she left behind carries the shape of a life spent preparing for something larger than personal legacy."

Lubaina Himid. The British Pavilion, courtesy of The British Council, photography by Eva Herzog.

Egyptian Pavilion, courtesy of La Biennale.

Monia Ben Hamouda at the Biblioteca Outside the exhibition, the world was may be that it does not make Venice Nazionale Marciana, marks one of the louder… The 2026 Biennale opened amid feel like Kouoh’s final chapter. It makes clearest signs of luxury patronage enterprotests, withdrawals, and institutional Venice feel like evidence. Evidence of ing the Biennale’s public architecture. strain. Russia and Israel’s participation the institutions she built before the Biendrew public scrutiny and action. Iran withnale. Evidence of the artists she gathered The exhibition’s architecture carries drew. Several national pavilions shut in across decades. Evidence of the friendKouoh’s logic. Wolff Architects, from protest over Israel’s inclusion. The inter- ships that became working structures.

Cape Town, had been chosen by her to national jury resigned in the days leading Evidence of a practice strong enough develop the scenography. Their collabup to the opening, leaving the Biennale to continue after its author had died. Evioration began through reading. Kouoh without its usual Golden Lion structure. dence that her presence in Venice was gave them Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The political weather around Venice was never only about being first.

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred charged by war, censorship, diplomacy, Years of Solitude as references. Those Her son, Djibril Schmed, said his mother boycott, grief, and outrage. books opened a route into ghosts, inheriliked to work with people she had a relatance, time, memory, and worlds that exist That tension sharpened the stakes for tionship with. Otobong Nkanga felt like beside the visible one.

Kouoh’s exhibition. In Minor Keys asks for family to him. He had spent holidays with attention while the world demands reac- artists who now appear in the exhibition.

Mourning is everywhere, but it does not tion. It creates spaces of rest during a Kouoh’s Biennale grew from those ties. It swallow the exhibition. Enchantment is moment that offers none. It turns towards was built from professional respect, yes, there, too. So are humour, ritual, sensuality, mourning, spirituality and repair while the but also from intimacy, loyalty, humour, politics, fatigue, beauty, and the stubborn public conversation around the Biennale trust, and the kind of knowledge that force of artists making work inside worlds circles violence, accountability, represen- comes from years of looking closely at under pressure. In Minor Keys asks for tation and institutional power. another person’s work. attention to what is low, interrupted, unreThe most moving thing about In Minor Keys That may be why the exhibition could consolved, and still alive. tinue, the structure was already relational and the team could carry it because Kouoh had built it around people, before anything else.

Koyo Kouoh did not live to see In Minor Keys installed. She did not stand in the Arsenale as visitors entered the exhibition. She did not see the olive tree turn, the sibyls gather, the bronzes arrive, the banners hang, the benches fill, the rooms absorb praise, criticism, fatigue, recognition, protest and grief. Yet the Biennale she left behind carries the shape of a life spent preparing for something larger than personal legacy. Venice did not crown her, it revealed what she had already built.

Wangechi Mutu, courtesy of La Biennale.

The British Pavilion, courtesy of The British Council, photography by Eva Herzog.

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words LOUIS PARKS

SUMMER READS THAT REFUSE ESCAPISM Five books moving through conflict, memory, identity, technology, and the emotional contradictions shaping the now.

Summer reading lists usually promise escape. The strongest books this season do the opposite. Across fiction, reportage, essays, and poetry, these five titles ask readers to sit inside uncertainty rather than outrun it, moving through war zones and marriages, inherited grief and digital loneliness. Cecilia Sala’s The Fire turns political journalism into intimate human experience, while Hafsa Lodi’s Turbulence explores faith, feminism, and emotional contradiction. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message interrogates storytelling itself, Leena Aboutaleb’s THALASSA approaches grief through myth and memory, and James Muldoon’s Love Machines examines what happens when intimacy becomes technological.

[01] THE FIRE — CECILIA SALA

There is a growing category of nonfiction attempting to merge journalism with emotional immersion, but very little of it avoids sentimentality or spectacle.

Cecilia Sala’s The Fire succeeds because it resists both. Following people across Iran, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, the book The sections on Iran’s Woman, Life, Freeapproaches conflict not through geodom movement are especially powerful, political abstraction but through daily life, balancing political urgency with moments capturing fear, exhaustion, humour, and of tenderness and ordinary human survival with remarkable restraint. interaction. Stylistically, Sala avoids the Sala’s reporting feels unusually intimate, self-consciousness that weakens much shaped in part by her own arrest in Tehran contemporary narrative nonfiction. Her in 2024 and subsequent imprisonment in prose remains clean, observant, and quiEvin Prison. That proximity gives the book etly devastating. emotional authority without tipping into At its core, The Fire is a portrait of generaself-mythology. Rather than flattening tional consciousness, young people fully resistance into heroism, Sala focuses on aware of the systems surrounding them, endurance: the act of continuing despite yet equally aware of how fragile hope can surveillance, violence, and instability. become. It stands out as one of the most emotionally intelligent works of reportage in recent years.

[02] THE MESSAGE — TA-NEHISI COATES Rapidly emerging as a classic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message explores storytelling as a political instrument, examining how nations construct narratives, how power shapes memory, and how histories become selectively preserved or erased. Structured through a series of essays moving between Senegal, South Carolina, and the West Bank, the book interrogates displacement, censorship, identity, and inherited mythologies.

When Coates is at his strongest, particularly in the sections set in Senegal, the book produces moments of genuine intellectual and emotional clarity. His writing remains rhythmic, reflective, and deeply attentive to the relationship between narrative and power. The central argument, that stories are never neutral, feels especially urgent in the current political climate.

At the same time, The Message is noticeably looser and more fragmented than Coates’s earlier work. Some sections feel exploratory rather than fully realised, and the political urgency occasionally overwhelms the reporting itself. Readers expecting the concentrated precision of Between the World and Me may find this book more restless and unresolved.

Even so, there is real value in that uncertainty. Coates approaches storytelling not simply as craft, but as infrastructure: something capable of shaping empathy, legitimising violence, and determining whose histories survive. The Message may be imperfect, but it remains intellectually ambitious and emotionally provocative throughout.

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[03] LOVE MACHINES — JAMES MULDOON James Muldoon’s Love Machines examines artificial intimacy with unusual nuance, focusing less on technological spectacle than emotional dependence.

Exploring AI companionship platforms, emotional chatbots, and digital relationships, the book argues that artificial intimacy emerges from societies already struggling to sustain meaningful human connection.

Muldoon’s central insight is that loneliness has become infrastructural, shaped by economic challenges, fragmented communities, dating app fatigue, and the erosion of public social spaces.

Rather than mocking people who form attachments to AI systems, he approaches them with empathy and sociological curiosity, treating these relationships as symptoms of broader social conditions rather than bizarre anomalies.

The book’s strongest sections focus on individual case studies, including users turning to AI after heartbreak or grief, and the rise of “deathbots” designed to simulate deceased loved ones through archived messages and recordings. Muldoon treats these stories seriously without descending into dystopian panic.

At the same time, Love Machines remains sharply critical of the companies monetising emotional vulnerability. Muldoon argues that technology firms are not simply building tools but reshaping emotional expectations themselves. Ultimately, the book becomes less about artificial intelligence and more about loneliness: how societies produce it, commodify it, and increasingly attempt to automate relief from it.

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[04] TURBULENCE — HAFSA LODI

[05] THALASSA — LEENA ABOUTALEB

Hafsa Lodi’s Turbulence examines marriage, faith, feminism, and identity through the life of Dunya Dawood, a woman reckoning with the emotional compromises shaping her adulthood. The novel opens aboard a flight to New York, where Dunya finds herself unexpectedly separated from her husband and son after being upgraded to business class, a moment of physical and emotional suspension that gives the book its structure.

Leena Aboutaleb’s THALASSA approaches grief through water, mythology, memory, and Palestinian identity, creating a poetry collection that feels submerged in atmosphere rather than structured around narrative clarity. The poems move slowly and tide-like, allowing emotional meaning to accumulate through repetition, fragmentation, and sensory detail.

Water becomes the collection’s dominant language: seas, tides, drowning, salt, and submersion recur throughout, creating movement between exile What could easily have become didactic instead feels and homeland, memory and forgetting, life and emotionally grounded as Lodi prioritises contradiction over argument. Faith exists here not as static iden- death. Aboutaleb’s imagery is intensely visual without becoming ornamental. Bodies dissolve into tity but as lived experience, negotiated daily through landscapes, domestic objects become haunted work, intimacy, ambition, and motherhood. The novel by absence, and mythology sits beside personal also explores how religion can become entangled memory with dreamlike fluidity. with patriarchal expectation without reducing its characters into ideological symbols.

What makes THALASSA especially compelling is its Lodi writes with clarity and restraint, allowing con- refusal to present grief as linear. Loss does not move neatly toward healing. Instead, mourning becomes versations around feminism, race, and belonging to environmental, inhabiting rooms, coastlines, histoemerge organically through relationships rather than exposition. The emotional pacing is strongest in qui- ries, and inherited trauma. Palestinian identity exists throughout the collection not as a direct declaration eter moments: lingering resentment, loneliness within marriage, and the invisible negotiations women per- but as an emotional condition. form to maintain stability.

Formally, the book balances accessibility with experimentation. Some poems unfold in long lyrical lines Some readers may find Dunya frustrating, but her inconsistency is precisely what makes the novel con- while others fracture into whispered fragments where silence becomes as important as language vincing. Turbulence is less interested in resolution itself. What lingers after reading is less any single than emotional realism, presenting uncertainty not as temporary disruption but as a permanent condi- poem than the atmosphere the collection creates: haunted, submerged, and quietly sad. tion of contemporary adulthood.

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BOTTLED DESIRE Discover the perfumes turning emotion into obsession

curation NADINE KAHIL illustration MAYA MAGED

Berry Crush, YVES SAINT LAURENT

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Dior Paradise, CHRISTIAN DIOR

Kurky, MAISON Orphéo, FRANCIS DIPTYQUE KURKDJIAN

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Un Jardin Sous la Mer, HERMÉS

Orphéon, DIPTYQUE

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Love Hibiscus, AMOUAGE

A Trivero, ZEGNA

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interview and words SANDRA YEGHIAZARIAN

PIAGET'S STUNNING FINAL CHAPTER OF EXTRALEGANZA All images courtesy of Piaget.

As Piaget completes its three-year high jewellery trilogy, Stéphanie Sivrière reflects on colour, emotion, craft, and the creative spirit that keeps the Maison surprising.

Piaget’s Colours of Extraleganza arrives as the third and final chapter in a three-year high jewellery trilogy, following Essence of Extraleganza, released for the Maison’s 150th anniversary in 2024, and last year’s Shapes of Extraleganza. Comprising 65 pieces, the collection explores Piaget’s golden era of the 1960s and 1970s, when colour, boldness, and technical freedom helped define the Maison’s visual language. This time, the inspiration turns toward Piaget’s own timepieces. The ultra-thin 9P calibre, introduced in 1957, opened up space on the dial, allowing the Maison to experiment with hardstone, gems, and colour in ways that still echo through its jewellery today. In conversation with YUNG’s Editor in Chief Sandra Yeghiazarian, Creative Director Stéphanie Sivrière reflects on Extralaganza, emotion, craft, and why surprise remains essential to Piaget.

The collection plays with some incredible colour combinations. How do you know when a mix of colours and stones work?

When creating the collection what inspired you most from the Piaget archives of the 1960s and 1970s and how do you choose which pieces or collection to bring it to life?

When I work with colour, for me it is more difficult than designing a diamond necklace. It is not the same because creating a combination of colours is very For me, Piaget is a very solar brand. The Mediterranean is also very challenging. inspiring to me. I am French and I grew up in the mountains, but Sometimes, when I choose a stone, it feels like painting. when I was young, I loved the Riviera, Greece, Tunisia and the I love painting, and I used to paint before designing for Mediterranean in general. It has always inspired me.

Piaget. When we work with colour, it is difficult to find the right harmony and the right balance of colours. For example, if I work on a necklace with emeralds, it creates a It takes me much more time than working with dia- completely different emotion depending on the metal. An emerald set in white gold does not evoke the same feeling as an monds. emerald set in yellow gold. It inspires a different kind of creativity I like contrast, I like gradients, and I like monochrome. It and gives a different emotion. depends. But it takes time. For me, there is a parallel with painting.

How important is emotion while designing high jewellery?

When I choose a stone, it is always about emotion. If I buy a watch, it is because of the movement inside. But with stones, it is always an emotional connection for me.

When I start a collection, I usually have a small selection of stones.

It helps me begin the creative process. Of course, I do not have every stone, because that can become a constraint.

It is good to start with, but afterwards I have more freedom to find the stones that best fit the design. Sometimes, once I find a particular stone, I redesign the necklace or the ring around it.

You have been with the brand for over two decades now and now you are closing the page on Extraleganza, tell us more.

It is the last chapter, but after working on Piaget’s 150th anniversary, I see it as a new chapter as well.

Of course, it is the final chapter of this collection, but for me it is also the beginning of something new because it allows people to recognise Piaget even more through these creations. I would say this is a new chapter for Piaget.

We continue the same spirit. That is why the pieces are not figurative. I like working with materials and contrasts. It gives much more character to a piece. When you combine the right colours and work them in the right way, the result is much stronger.

And gold, at Piaget, is more than a material. Gold is a colour in itself.

We work with gold in a very specific way. When I work with stones, I always take the colour of the gold into account because it changes the emotion of the piece. If I choose a different gold colour with the same stone, it will not create the same emotion.

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Many luxury brands are embracing minimalism today, yet Piaget continues to celebrate colour. Why do you think people are drawn to this right now?

I think it is a new trend for the younger generation. The new generation wants authenticity.

Ten or twenty years ago, people wanted to have the same brands and the same watches as everyone else. Today, the younger generation is looking more for authenticity, values and heritage, and they appreciate those things.

It is good for the brand because Piaget has always stood for that. Piaget has always been a niche brand, and today the new generation is increasingly drawn to brands like that.

And why do you think this new generation is drawn more to the brand?

It has a more vintage feel, which gives it a sense of authenticity. At the same time, because the pieces are not figurative, they feel more contemporary. For me, that balance between vintage inspiration and a contemporary approach is very important.

What’s the biggest lesson Piaget has taught you about creativity?

Piaget is a very challenging brand, and that is something I really enjoy. It is challenging because we are much smaller than many other brands. Within the Richemont Group, for example, we are a very small team. But we are a creative team.

Today, you have to be original and very creative. We are all influenced by the same things. On social media, we all see the same images and the same references. At Piaget, we push design as far as possible. That is how we differentiate ourselves — through creativity.

We also have this incredible craftsmanship with gold, which is something truly unique to Piaget. The way we work with gold is extraordinary and plays a very important role in our creations.

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When you think of the future of Piaget, what excites you most?

Since I started at Piaget, what I have loved most are the stones — the diversity of the stones and the combination of ornamental stones with precious gemstones. I find that incredible.

I also love the collaborations with artisans. They are so important. Today, métiers d’art and artisans need luxury maisons because, without them, it becomes very difficult for many of these crafts to survive.

For me, the jeweller and the artisan are just as important, if not more important, than the designer. I really enjoy working with them because everyone brings their expertise, talent and craftsmanship to the project. These collaborations are essential. When we create a piece, all these artisans bring their strengths and talents together with a shared vision. That is what makes the final creation so special. The métiers d’art need the maisons, and the maisons also need the métiers d’art.

You’ve been with the brand for over 20 years.

How has Piaget shaped you personally and as a creative director?

Piaget is a Maison where I have grown professionally. I started in jewellery, and at the time jewellery was still relatively new for Piaget, which was primarily known as a watchmaker.

Developing the jewellery side of the business was challenging because it was something new for the Maison and it took time. Over the years, I have been able to see its evolution, and that is one of the reasons I stayed at Piaget.

I used to tell myself that I would never stay ten years at the same company. But I evolved with the Maison, and I grew alongside it. At every stage, I was offered new leadership roles. Then I was asked to take on watchmaking, even though I knew nothing.

Today, I am proud to say that I have succeeded in doing watchmaking at Piaget, something that maybe fifteen years ago I would never have imagined myself doing.

Now, I do not want to leave. I feel good in the Maison because I have also helped build many of its foundations. It feels like my home. Of course, I am not saying that I invented everything at Piaget — watchmaking was already there — but I am proud to have continued and strengthened this identity. Today, I feel that we have rediscovered an identity that, at one point, we had lost.

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If you could describe Piaget in three words, what would they be and why?

Joyful, elegant and surprising.

I like “surprising” because, for example, when we create stone dials for the Andy Warhol collection, I always look for unusual stones. Today there is a trend around ornamental stones, and everyone tends to use the same ones — malachite, turquoise and other familiar stones. My goal is always to find stones that people do not know. We are now using stones such as thulite and other less familiar materials.

How do you find your stones?

I discover many of them by visiting gemstone fairs. I like to choose stones directly at the fairs.

For me, the best fair in the world is in Tucson, Arizona.

There is a major gemstone fair and a large ornamental stone fair there. We do not necessarily buy a lot in Tucson, but for designers it is an incredible source of inspiration because there is so much freedom. You discover a huge variety of coloured stones, including stones you have never seen before.

What I love about this fair is the passion. You can feel it everywhere, and that is what makes it so special.

For me, buying coloured stones is completely different from buying diamonds. It is not the same process and not the same emotion. Coloured stones are subtle.

They are about rarity and emotion. Diamonds, for me, are more of an investment and are perhaps easier to access and understand.

Geology is also very important. It is important to understand why you choose a particular emerald, for example. An emerald from Colombia and an emerald from Zambia do not have exactly the same colour, the differences are subtle.

I love those subtleties within a stone. For example, if I choose an emerald for a jewellery piece, I will often choose one with blue undertones. Some emeralds have more yellow undertones, but for me that creates a more traditional, more stately feeling. If I choose an emerald with blue tones, it feels fresher, more joyful and more modern. That is what I like.

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words NADINE KAHIL

THE GOLDEN HOUR From eye-catching dials to precious metals and bold new silhouettes, summer’s finest watches bring heat, colour and craftsmanship to the wrist.

At Watches and Wonders 2026, watchmaking steps into the light.

This was not a season defined by one grand breakthrough, but by a brighter, more expressive mood across the maisons. Dials shimmer, metals glow, colours deepen, and complications are more about the feeling than bold statements. These are watches made not only to measure time, but to catch it — in sunlight, in movement, in the long golden hours of summer.

From Audemars Piguet’s renewed spirit of collaboration to Cartier’s elegant illusions, from Hermès’ poetic mechanics to Vacheron Constantin’s ultra-thin precision, each creation offers its own perspective, while Piaget and Van Cleef & Arpels continue to intertwine jewellery and watchmaking, bringing emotion, brilliance and craft together on the wrist.

What emerges is a season of radiance. Time is no longer simply read; it is worn, felt and lived. Through rare materials, bold colour and technical mastery, our favourites from Watches and Wonders 2026 capture heritage in full summer bloom.

Ludo Secret, VAN CLEEF & ARPELS

Van Cleef & Arpels brought attention back exacting care, transforming components to the intimacy of craftsmanship with the into a cohesive whole.

Ludo Secret, a timepiece where watchThe “secret” lies not only in the hidden dial making unfolds as a sequence of precise, but in the making itself. The closing of the almost invisible gestures. Rather than case, the alignment of the module, and focusing solely on the finished object, the the final quality checks reveal a rhythm of Maison highlights the process behind it, gestures that define the piece beyond its where every detail is shaped by hand. appearance. The Ludo Secret becomes From the delicate placement of hands both a watch and a reflection of time on the dial to the careful casing of the measured through craft, where every movement, each step requires controlled movement leaves a trace. precision. Tools meet materials with

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J12 Golden Black Caliber 12.1 (42 mm), CHANEL

Chanel refined one of its most iconic silhouettes with the J12 Golden Black, a study in contrast where light meets depth.

The watch plays on the tension between matte black ceramic and flashes of yellow gold, creating a piece that feels both minimal and striking.

The 42 mm version is defined by its unidirectional rotating bezel and sleek ceramic construction, designed for durability while maintaining a polished, almost archi-

tectural presence. Gold-plated indexes punctuate the matte dial, catching light with precision and adding warmth to the otherwise monochrome palette.

At its core is the Caliber 12.1 automatic movement, chronometer-certified and developed in collaboration with Kenissi, offering both technical reliability and refinement. The oscillating weight, visible through the sapphire caseback, mirrors

the gold detailing on the dial, reinforcing the watch’s cohesive design.

With a 70-hour power reserve and water resistance up to 200 metres, the J12 Golden Black balances performance with understated elegance.

Leaning into the emotional, Hermès approached time with quiet complexity through the Slim d’Hermès Squelette Lune, a piece that balances precision with poetry. Defined by its clean lines and restrained silhouette, the watch opens up to reveal a layered mechanical world beneath its surface.

The openworked dial creates a dialogue between light and structure, exposing the skeletonised movement while maintaining a sense of clarity. At 6 o’clock, a double moon phase complication adds a dreamlike dimension, tracking lunar cycles across both hemispheres and reinforcing Hermès’ emotive approach to time.

Housed in a 39.5 mm case in titanium or platinum, the watch is powered by the ultra-thin Manufacture H1953 movement, combining technical precision with visual lightness. The bridges, visible through the sapphire caseback, echo the tones of the dial, creating a cohesive aesthetic.

Finished with a refined leather strap, the piece reflects Hermès’ belief that time is not just measured, but experienced.

Slim d’Hermès Squelette Lune, HERMÈS

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Jaeger-LeCoultre transformed its Reverso One into a canvas of nature with La Vallée des Merveilles, a new capsule series dedicated to Métiers Rares. Each piece moves beyond watchmaking into art, capturing landscapes from Hawaii to Japan through intricate craftsmanship and storytelling.

On the reverse, the case becomes the focal point.

Scenes of hibiscus flowers, birds, and cherry blossoms are rendered in Grand Feu champlevé enamel, layered and fired at high temperatures to achieve depth and intensity. Gold-leaf paillonnage and snow-set diamonds add texture and light, creating compositions that feel alive and in motion.

Each watch requires over a hundred hours of artisanal work, reflecting a meticulous dialogue between enamellers and gem-setters. The front remains deliberately restrained, with a mother-of-pearl dial balancing the richness of the reverse.

Produced in editions of 20, the Reverso One becomes a wearable narrative, where time and nature intertwine.

Reverso One, La Vallée Des Merveilles, JAEGER-LECOULTRE

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Happy Sport Happy Hearts, CHOPARD

For this year’s event, Chopard brought a softer, more playful energy create a sense of rhythm and lightness, where time is expressed to its iconic Happy Sport line with the Happy Hearts edition, a through movement rather than structure. piece that balances emotion, movement, and contrast. Framed The addition of a denim strap shifts the tone, grounding the piece in Lucent Steel, the 33 mm case introduces a contemporary, susin a more relaxed, everyday elegance while maintaining its tainable edge, while the dial remains unmistakably poetic. refined identity. Powered by Chopard’s in-house 09.01-C autoAt its centre, a white mother-of-pearl dial becomes a stage for matic movement, the watch offers both precision and fluidity. motion. Two hearts, one in matching mother-of-pearl and the This is a study in contrasts, where craftsmanship meets spontaother in a pink-purple gradient, move freely beneath the sapneity, and tradition feels effortlessly alive. phire crystal, joined by three dancing diamonds. Together, they

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Audemars Piguet shifted the focus back to the essence of watchmaking with the Atelier des Établisseurs, a project rooted in collaboration, rare crafts, and the revival of an 18th-century system where independent artisans came together to create a single timepiece.

Within this vision, the Établisseurs Galets Soldat emerges as a quiet yet powerful expression of form and material. Inspired by the natural stones of the Vallée de Joux, the watch approaches time as something fluid rather than fixed. Its pebble-like silhouette is softened through an interplay of polished gold and natural stone, where each element feels shaped by time itself rather than by design alone. The dial is intentionally stripped back, allowing the stone to take the focus, interrupted only by delicate gold hands and the signature monogram.

Établisseurs Galets Soldat, AUDEMARS PIGUET

Myst, CARTIER

Cartier presented the watch as an object of intrigue with Myst, a creation where time is intentionally concealed within jewellery. Rather than presenting the dial upfront, the piece unfolds through layers, inviting a slower, more deliberate interaction.

The bracelet takes on a sculptural form, composed of twisting gold, diamonds, and black accents that move fluidly around the wrist.

The design plays with contrast and light, creating a sense of

motion even when still. The dial remains discreet, almost hidden within the composition, reinforcing Cartier’s long-standing fascination with mystery and transformation.

Crafted through meticulous stone-setting and gold work, every element is designed to reflect and capture light. Myst is not about telling time at a glance, focusing instead on the experience, where discovery, movement, and craftsmanship define the piece.

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THE HEATWAVE Overseas Self-Winding Ultra-Thin (Calibre 2550), VACHERON CONSTANTIN

Vacheron Constantin refines the idea of performance through between slimness and efficiency. Each component is carefully restraint with the Overseas Self-Winding Ultra-Thin, powered by arranged to maximise space without compromising stability. the new Calibre 2550. Seven years in development, the moveEncased in 950 platinum, the 39.5 mm watch maintains a refined, ment measures just 2.4 mm thick while delivering an 80-hour almost minimal presence, enhanced by a salmon-toned dial that power reserve, redefining what ultra-thin watchmaking can nods to the Maison’s heritage. With a total thickness of just 7.35 achieve. mm, it becomes the thinnest Overseas model to date.

The innovation lies in its architecture. A platinum micro-rotor is Produced in 255 pieces, it reflects precision reduced to its purest integrated directly into the mainplate, paired with a suspended form. double barrel and a compact gear train, creating a balance

Sixtie on Strap, PIAGET

Piaget continues its exploration of form and freedom with the Sixtie on Strap, a piece that blurs the line between watch and jewellery. Rooted in the Maison’s late 1960s design language, the trapeze-shaped case returns as a symbol of an era when timekeeping became expressive, fluid, and unapologetically bold.

This new iteration shifts the focus through contrast. A deep blue alligator strap grounds the piece, adding a contemporary edge to its otherwise sculptural silhouette. Against it, the pink gold case is defined by delicate gadroons that curve

around the bezel, catching light with subtle movement.

Two dial variations extend the narrative: a silvered satin-brushed surface with gold Roman numerals, and a blue quartz stone dial, each naturally veined and entirely unique. The latter reinforces Piaget’s legacy in ornamental stone, where material becomes as expressive as design.

The Sixtie represents a combination of precision and presence, where time becomes something worn, shaped, and lived.

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gthy and

he new e brand

Oyster, ROLEX

Marking the 100th anniversary of Rolex’s pioneering Oyster case Crafted from Oystersteel, Rolex’s corrosion-resistant 904L alloy, in 2026, the Maison unveils a new Oyster Perpetual 36 distinthe 36mm case offers water resistance to 100 metres and is guished by a vibrant multicoloured lacquer dial. Decorated with paired with an Oyster bracelet featuring the Easylink comfort the iconic Jubilee motif first introduced in the 1970s, the design extension. Powering the watch is the manufacture Calibre 3230, takes on added significance through the Rolex name, rendered delivering a 70-hour power reserve, Chronergy escapement, and across the dial in ten contrasting colours. Achieving the intricate Paraflex shock absorbers, alongside Rolex’s enhanced Superlapattern required exceptional precision, with each colour applied tive Chronometer certification for performance and reliability. individually to ensure perfect alignment of every shape and letter.

Bvlgari pushes the Octo Finissimo into a new era of precision, proportion, and ultra-thin innovation. Reimagined in a refined 37mm case, the latest Octo Finissimo introduces an entirely new in-house movement developed over three years, combining a 72-hour power reserve with a lighter, more ergonomic silhouette. The collection continues Bvlgari’s obsession with radical elegance, balancing Roman architectural inspiration with con-

temporary wearability. Alongside titanium, yellow gold, and minute repeater versions, the Maison also unveils the Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon Platinum, now the world’s thinnest flying tourbillon in platinum at just 1.85mm thick. More than technical achievement, the new Octo Finissimo reflects Bvlgari’s evolving vision of modern watchmaking: refined, architectural, and unmistakably Italian.

The Octo Finissimo Ultra Tourbillon Platinum, BVLGARI

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words LOUIS PARKS

BETWEEN WORLDS Magana’s Omar Chaoui on building a watch brand with soul.

Luxury watch brands usually begin with legacy. A founder references a Swiss grandfather, a centuries-old workshop, or a technical obsession polished over generations. Magana begins somewhere else entirely: with a passion for its home and a desire for a life well lived.

“When it comes to luxury, I think we have to be humble and admit that the world doesn’t really need another brand or another watch,” says founder Omar Chaoui. “What the world does need however is more kindness, more soul.”

That perspective sits at the centre of Tanja, Magana’s limited-production collection: an 8mm ultra-thin, 37mm watch with natural stone dials inspired by Tangier, the Moroccan city where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean, and where cultures, languages, and histories seem to overlap endlessly. The stunning pieces were designed by Iman Coccellato, a young fashion designer celebrated for his understated aesthetic and instinctive sense of balance.

Founded in the UAE in 2021, Magana exists somewhere between lifestyle brand and watchmaker. Chaoui, who is Moroccan but has spent most of his life in Dubai, speaks about identity the same way he speaks about design, fluidly, without borders or absolutes.

“As far as I am concerned, Magana is equally Moroccan and Emirati,” he says. “And like Dubai itself, it is meant to feel relevant to anyone, anywhere in the world — without ever apologizing for the Arabic, Islamic and Emirati culture that shapes it.”

Tanja Aventurine.

That duality defines Tanja. The word itself is the Arabic name for Tangier, a city that exists between worlds.

During the early-to-mid twentieth century, Tangier became a cultural crossroads for Western artists, writers, musicians, and wanderers searching for reinvention. Paul Bowles, Henri Matisse, and Tennessee Williams all passed through it.

“I would gently insist that we don’t see ourselves as a watch brand in the traditional sense, but rather as a lifestyle brand that happens to make watches,” Chaoui says. “So, when we launch a new piece, like Tanja, the conversation we want to have is cultural and human, not technical.”

The watch itself reflects that mindset. Slim at just 8mm, gender-fluid in proportion, and available with dials made from materials including malachite, meteorite, aventurine, tiger’s eye, mother-of-pearl, and black onyx, Tanja feels less concerned with traditional horology codes than atmosphere.

Paul Bowles photographed in Tangier.

Tanja Tiger Eye.

“The meteorite stone we use, for example, is cut from a rock that formed more than four billion years ago and [that] travelled through the cosmos before falling to Earth,” Chaoui says. “Compared to that, what are the eighty or ninety years we get to live?”

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Tanja Malachite.

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Inspiration, Villa Tangiers.

That philosophical relationship with time is central to Magana’s identity. The brand’s guiding ethos, “Time That Matters”, emerged from Chaoui questioning what luxury brands actually communicate.

“What I realized is that very few brands talk about time itself, and what it means,” he says. “Time is the only thing all of us receive in equal measure. It cannot be accumulated, stored or transferred. No matter what we do, it gets spent. The only question is how we choose to spend it.”

For Chaoui, the point is not aspiration in the traditional luxury sense. It is intention.

“When we are old grey and looking back at our lives, none of us will regret missing a promotion, an investment opportunity or a DJ set,” he says. “What we will regret is not having spent enough time with the people we love, on our health, and on building memories that meant something.”

In an industry still obsessed with heritage, Magana is doing something rarer: building emotional permanence in real time.

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words YASMINA F. BITAR

THE ANTIEURO SUMMER GUIDE Six destinations across the Arab world and its eastern Mediterranean orbit. Where to sleep, what to eat, where to stay out — and why the best of everything was always closer to home.

Scroll long enough and you’ll find it: sun-bleached terraces in Portofino, linen shirts in Provence, someone perpetually mid–pasta pomodoro. Euro summer is no longer a season so much as an algorithm.

Meanwhile, the places just east and south of Europe were never waiting to be discovered by a travel supplement. They were waiting for us to stop treating proximity like a consolation prize. From Tangier’s speakeasies to bonfires in Siwa, bass drops beneath the Pyramids, and Bodrum’s late-afternoon Aegean glow, the best of everything is closer to home than you think.

Villa Mabrouka, photography by Andrew Montgomery.

TANGIER

Villa Mabrouka, photography by Andrew Montgomery.

your teta’s courtyard, if your teta collected Heaven forbid you’re ever struck by creMurano chandeliers and had a dangerous ative block, but if you are, Tangier has plant habit. long been the place to outrun it. Saint Laurent arrived and never quite left; Bourdain Walk the kasbah, then slip into Galerie Conil for raw and contemporary work filmed Parts Unknown here and, for once, by artists who actually live here. At Café found somewhere that could keep up.

Baba, pale blue and permanently smokeTangier has always been more projection filled, the King of Spain once drank mint than place. In the medina, the air catches tea; Bourdain came for something stron— cedar, mint, leather, smoke — and ger. Nearby, Fondouk Chejra is where underneath it all, something you can’t the basket bags sold online at triple the quite name. mark-up are made.

Book Villa Mabrouka, where Jasper Conran At night, head to El Morocco Club. Dakhla has reinvigorated Yves Saint Laurent and oysters upstairs, then downstairs into the Pierre Bergé’s former retreat as a 12-room speakeasy. Tangier’s beautiful people are hotel above the Strait of Gibraltar: like already there. They’ve been here all along.

Courtesy of Mandarin Oriental Bodrum.

BODRUM Bodrum is not Europe, whatever the yachts would like you to believe. It sits in that familiar eastern Mediterranean register: sea-facing, late-eating, family-adjacent, glamour-literate, and just chaotic enough to feel human. Out on the Aegean, gulets idle beside superyachts; by late afternoon, the water turns a flat, reflective silver. The light bleaches, softens, flatters everything in sight.

The Mandarin Oriental operates like a small, immaculately governed country. Navy golf carts move you between Hakkasan,

the hammam, and a private beach club rants where mezze arrives one after where the döner — mustard-sharp, slow- another and the atmosphere remains rescooked, folded into warm pitta — sells olutely unpolished. out before noon. Staff outnumber guests.

For sunset, drive out to Limon Gümüşlük.

Your room opens onto the Aegean, Sit under the citrus trees with something framed by two laurel trees and a wall of cold and watch the horizon pull the coastsliding glass. There is no reason to leave, line into silhouette. From here, Europe and everyone here behaves accordingly. feels close enough to register, but far Leave anyway. Scorpios, newly arrived enough not to matter from Mykonos, runs on a familiar rhythm: beach club by day, dance floor by night.

In Bodrum Town, the sixteenth-century castle anchors a strip of seafood restau-

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SIWA OASIS Seven hours west of Alexandria, the signal Come with friends. By the second day, After dark, bonfires burn low. Someone drops, the road narrows, and Egypt you’re saying things you didn’t plan to. always says they’ll turn in early and never exhales into something older. In a season Mornings begin with swims in the salt does. On the edge of a salt lake, your back of see-and-be-seen, Siwa is the destinalakes; evenings gather around long tables against a white ridge, palm groves in the tion that couldn’t care less if you came. where slow-cooked tagines, fresh bread, distance, a horse crossing the dunes, the and herbs picked hours earlier are served sky widening as the light recedes.

Adrère Amellal is entirely off-grid: no Wi-Fi, under an open sky. no lightbulbs, just cottages built from It’s the kind of trip that turns into a story you rock salt, clay, and straw. The whole place keep telling, usually with the very people looks like a sandcastle that decided to who were there. hold its shape.

Courtesy of Manara Arts and Culture.

AMMAN Amman is built across seven hills, predom- Then: Manara Arts and Culture, a café and The next morning, drive south. Petra, a rose-red city carved into rock 2,000 years cultural space in Jabal Weibdeh where inantly in beige, and almost aggressively ago, is one of the seven wonders of the exhibitions share the terrace with a strong modest — it’s a city that has never once world. Sure. But nothing is as wondrous Turkish coffee. Stay until the light goes. thought to brag about itself. Check in as Fakhreldin.

Walk through Weibdeh afterwards — the to the Ritz-Carlton, where the rooms Arabic on the signs, the particular way a come with floor-to-ceiling windows, dark stranger nods at you like you might be a marble, and service that knows what you distant cousin. need before you do.

For lunch, falafel at Al Quds on Rainbow Street is shatteringly crisp, dripping with tahini, and best eaten standing up, because sitting down would suggest you had the patience to wait.

For dinner, Fakhreldin, housed in a former prime minister’s residence, serves kibbeh nayeh that a friend with 724 restaurants logged on Beli still ranks among the best he’s ever eaten.

ALULA The Nabataean tombs at Hegra are less Check in to Our Habitas AlUla, where villas Eat at Tofareya for Bedouin cooking: slowsit low against the valley and the land- cooked lamb, spiced rice, and dates famous than Petra’s, astonishingly well threaded through both savoury and scape does most of the decorating. preserved, and carved into sandstone sweet dishes, served as if nothing was cliffs with total conviction. The rock for- Mornings begin with yoga overlooking ever lost. the escarpment; evenings close with mations around them have been shaping sound baths as the light drops behind the themselves for millennia, worn into At night, the stars sharpen into view — cliffs. The spa uses moringa oil from the shapes time invented. dense, insistent. You leave lighter. The nearby oasis, though the desert air does desert keeps whatever you leave behind.

Then Saudi Arabia opened a wellness most of the work. resort in the middle of it. It sounds like a press release until you’re standing in the canyon and your inbox feels faintly ridiculous.

CAIRO Cairo exhales around 5pm. By 7pm, it pours back onto the streets with absolutely no intention of stopping.

Take your breather at Mazeej Balad, a boutique hotel downtown in the quarter they call Paris on the Nile, though the comparison flatters Paris. Watch evening arrive from the rooftop. Cafés in Zamalek fill, neon signs flicker, shisha smoke thickens.

Fuel up at Café Riche, open since 1908, where Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz held court and Egypt’s writers, artists, and revolutionaries gathered over coffee

Courtesy of Mazeej Balad.

Courtesy of AlUla.

to argue about the future. His portrait still An Amr Diab remix cuts through, and hangs centre stage, the walls lined with suddenly it lands differently. Here, it has faces of Cairo’s intellectual aristocracy, weight. The melody that scored a thouwatching you drink coffee in the same sand borrowed summers, finally heard room — which is either humbling or a dare, where it was always meant to be. depending on your evening’s ambitions.

If you’ve ever lived between cultures and Then the bass drops. At Giza Pyramids, wondered where the centre was, this is Ahmed Spins and Keinemusik have the moment it stops being a question. played to thousands beneath the stones, ancient and electronic pulsing in the same air. Cairo’s revolutionaries once met in coffeehouses. Now, another generation gathers on the dance floor.

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words NADINE KAHIL

AMSTERDAM RE-IMAGINED THROUGH ANANTARA Inside the rebirth of Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky Amsterdam, where 155 years of history meet a new era of experiential luxury on Dam Square.

In a city defined by history, canals, and layered cultural memory, few addresses hold the emotional weight of Amsterdam’s Dam Square. It is the beating heart of the Dutch capital, where a history of movement, trade, celebration, and reinvention continues to be written every day.

And overlooking it all stands Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky Amsterdam, a property that has witnessed the city evolve since the 19th century.

Now, after an extensive transformation, the historic landmark enters a new

chapter under Anantara Hotels & Resorts, bringing the brand’s immersive approach to luxury hospitality to the Netherlands for the very first time.

Originally founded in 1866 by Polish tailor Adolph Wilhelm Krasnapolsky, the property began as a modest coffee house before evolving into one of Amsterdam’s most iconic grand hotels. Over decades, it became synonymous with glamour, innovation, and social life within the city. One of Amsterdam’s earliest luxury hotels, from offering telephones and hot water

in every room to unveiling the dazzling Wintergarden illuminated by thousands of Edison bulbs, Krasnapolsky has long existed as both a cultural landmark and a symbol of modernity.

That layered heritage remains deeply embedded within the property today.

Leaning into this rich history, Anantara’s vision carefully restores and reframes it for a contemporary audience. Following two years of renovations, the hotel reopened

with 402 redesigned rooms and suites, Anantara’s global identity, which focuses balancing Dutch modernism with warm on creating experiences rooted in local residential touches. Neutral palettes, tac- culture, history, and storytelling. tile textures, parquet floors, oversized At Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky windows, and sweeping Dam Square Amsterdam, those experiences unfold views create spaces that feel simultanein a distinctly Dutch manner. Guests can ously intimate and grand. step inside one of the city’s oldest disWhat distinguishes the hotel, however, is tilleries to discover a private spirits and not simply its architecture or scale, but mixology experience, learn the art of diathe way it connects guests to Amsterdam mond polishing at the renowned House itself. This philosophy sits at the centre of of Gassan, or escape into tulip fields for

All images courtesy of Hotel Anantara.

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champagne picnics surrounded by endless blooms. Rather than offering tourism at a distance, the hotel immerses visitors directly into Amsterdam’s creative and cultural fabric.

Food also plays a defining role in shaping the hotel’s identity. At Michelin-starred The White Room, one of Amsterdam’s oldest restaurants, Chef Tristan de Boer blends Indonesian, Japanese, Thai, and Surinamese influences with local Dutch ingredients, reflecting the multicultural spirit of the city itself. Elsewhere, Grand Café Krasnapolsky overlooks Dam Square with an atmosphere that feels timelessly European, while The Tailor Bar pays homage to founder Adolph Krasnapolsky’s original profession through cocktails inspired by textiles, craftsmanship, and trade routes across Europe and Asia.

Beyond gastronomy, wellness becomes another cornerstone of the experience. Designed as an urban sanctuary overlooking the hotel’s hidden Summer Garden, Anantara Spa merges Thai healing traditions with advanced European skincare science. Treatments combine techniques such as stretching, compression, and deep tissue therapies with scientifically advanced skincare from brands including Swissline and Bloomeffects, the latter drawing inspiration from Holland’s iconic tulip fields. The result feels deeply aligned with Amsterdam itself: restorative, calm, and quietly luxurious.

Yet perhaps the hotel’s most compelling quality lies in its emotional understanding of hospitality. Despite its grandeur, the property never feels distant or performative. Instead, it carries the warmth of a place that has always been part of the city’s social rhythm. Breakfasts unfold beneath the magnificent glass roof of the historic Wintergarden, cocktails spill onto the terrace of The Tailor Bar as locals gather into the evening, and hidden interior gardens offer moments of stillness in the middle of Amsterdam’s constant movement.

This balance between heritage and relevance is precisely what gives Anantara Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky Amsterdam its renewed significance. In an era where luxury increasingly shifts toward emotional connection and meaningful experiences, the hotel succeeds not by recreating the past, but by allowing history, culture, and contemporary hospitality to exist together naturally.

The hotel is nothing less than a lens through which to experience Amsterdam itself — layered, intimate, cosmopolitan, and endlessly alive.

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words NADINE KAHIL

MEMORIES OF THE SEA All images courtesy of Mariolino.

Inside Mariolino, Mario Jr. Haddad’s most personal project yet in Ramla, Sahel.

For Mario Jr. Haddad, hospitality has never about hosting as a form of storytelling, the own world. Everything I’ve ever set out to been about formality. It has always been emotional energy behind Mariolino, and do has come from a place of passion, and about people, emotion, and the feeling of why creating memories matters more to that’s always been my driving force. being welcomed somewhere that already him than creating a destination.

I come from a cinema background; I’m the feels familiar. With Mariolino The Beach third generation of a family in film distribuHouse in Ramla, Sahel, he transforms tion. My childhood weekends were spent Mariolino already feels deeply perthat instinct into something deeply peraccompanying my father to the cinema sonal, almost like an extension sonal, a space shaped by friendship, food, of your own world. At what point on Saturday and Sunday mornings to storytelling, and human connection. No did you realise you wanted to watch upcoming releases he needed to mere guesthouse, Mariolino reflects the assess and date. Being exposed to storycreate a space that reflected world Haddad naturally creates around telling at such a young age played a huge your lifestyle and way of hosthim: warm, intimate, soulful, and entirely role in shaping my curiosity and imagiing? centred around bringing people together. nation. Combined with the influence my Nearly everything professional I’ve ever In conversation with YUNG, he speaks father had on my love of food, hospitalundertaken has been an extension of my ity, and human connection, it ultimately shaped both the person I became and the career paths I chose.

As I grew older, though, I realised that some of my greatest pleasures in life come from simply being around the people I love, and even more so from hosting them. Creating moments, bringing people together, making them feel at home, that became something deeply fulfilling to me.

So in many ways, the shift from restaurateur to guesthouse host feels incredibly natural. It’s still storytelling. It’s still about emotion, atmosphere, and creating experiences people carry with them long after they leave. At the end of the day, it’s really just another extension of what I’ve always done: doing what I love and loving what I do.

You’ve always been someone who naturally brings people together.

How did that instinct shape the atmosphere and experience of Mariolino?

The idea behind Mariolino The Beach House is very much an extension of my lifestyle and my love of bringing people together. I’m a huge believer in energy, and to me, nothing creates that more than the interaction between like-minded people in a safe, warm, and happy environment.

From the beginning, I wanted the experience to feel natural and effortless; a place where people could truly relax, connect, share stories, meals, music, and moments together. That sense of community and human connection is really the soul of Mariolino.

Mariolino doesn’t feel like a traditional hospitality project. Why was it important for you to create something more intimate and emotional rather than a classic guesthouse?

As you mentioned earlier, this project feels more like an extension of me than anything else I’ve done before, so intimacy and emotional connection were always essential to the experience we wanted to create.

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Very early on, we realized that the best way Ramla has its own particular energy. Mariolino feels rooted in friendship, to preserve that atmosphere was through What made this location feel community, and warmth. How a guest-list approach, allowing us to build right for Mariolino? much of your personal circle the community organically from the You’re absolutely right, Ramla has a very and real-life relationships influground up, starting with the people closparticular energy that immediately enced the spirit of the house? est to me. appealed to me. But what elevated that Completely. Mariolino is entirely rooted feeling tenfold was the incredible team in friendship, community, warmth, and I never wanted Mariolino to feel transacbehind the project: Marakez. shared experiences; all things that nattional. I wanted it to feel personal, warm, urally come from the people I love and familiar, almost like being welcomed into I’ve rarely witnessed such synergy within surround myself with. someone’s home rather than checking such a large group of people. Their enthuinto a traditional hospitality concept. siasm, support, professionalism, and In many ways, the spirit of the house is genuine belief in the project brought my simply an extension of those relationships team and me so much joy throughout and that energy. And honestly, when you Food seems to sit at the centre of the process. Honestly, that alone already think about it… how could that not be fun? everything you do. What kind of feels like a measure of success.

memories, emotions, or experiences do you hope people In a region where hospitality is often leave with after spending time How do you scout locations for your becoming more commercial around your table? projects and visions? What do and polished, Mariolino feels Cooking for the people I love has always you instinctively look for when intentionally relaxed and human. been my love language. It’s always been imagining a space before it even Was that contrast important to my way of bringing people together exists? you? and creating moments tied to emotion, memory, and connection.

Oddly enough, I rarely actively scout for Of course. Since the project is such a locations or new projects, yet I constantly direct extension of who I am and what I find myself creating something new. I believe in, it was very important to me that, At Mariolino, everything revolves around guess my enthusiasm somehow mani- despite the level of service and attention sharing; the food, the conversations, the fests them. to detail, the experience always remained laughter, the atmosphere, the memories. unpretentious, relaxed, human, and soulMore than anything, I’m drawn to places More than anything, I hope people leave ful. that evoke a feeling, spaces with soul, carrying a feeling with them. That sense warmth, character, and the potential to I never wanted perfection to come at the of warmth and togetherness you expericreate human connection and beautiful expense of warmth. ence after a beautiful meal surrounded by memories. people you genuinely enjoy being with.

You’re personally cooking, hosting, and present within the experience itself. Why was it important for you not to separate yourself from the project?

Because if I had separated myself from it, then I’d simply be opening a boutique hotel, and that was never the intention.

I’m at a point in my life and career where I want to focus more on what genuinely brings me joy. And right now, what brings me the most pleasure is hosting people I love, my friends, their friends and families, and eventually the wonderful people I’ll meet through them.

Being personally present is what gives the project its soul.

What do you hope Mariolino becomes over time — a destination, a community, or simply a feeling people keep returning to every summer?

Probably a combination of all three. But truthfully, I’m less consumed by the idea of people simply returning every summer than I am by the desire to create unforgettable moments of magic.

If people leave with memories, emotions, friendships, stories, and moments they carry with them long after the summer ends, then I feel like we’ve succeeded.

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Turns out they were hiding in plain sight after all.

RM 55-01 Manual winding skeletonised movement 55-hour power reserve (±10%) Baseplate and bridges in grade 5 titanium Free-sprung balance with variable inertia Double-barrel system Case in Carbon TPT® and grade 5 titanium

A Racing Machine On The Wrist