Fashioning North Africa: Reclaiming cultural narratives in fashion with Nada Koreish

👗 Nada Koreish sat down with EnterpriseAM to discuss her new book, A Meeting of Cultures: Fashioning North Africa. The book, inspired by an exhibition of the same name, is the first to focus specifically on contemporary fashion designers and influencers in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

For decades, North African craft and aesthetics have been used as input for other people’s businesses — raw material for European luxury houses and the subject of scholarship written almost entirely by Europeans and Americans. Nada Koreish, a UK-based designer, academic, and trend forecaster, spent years inside the fashion design system before she saw her own place in it clearly.

“Oh my God, you’re so exotic”

“I was their token exotic person,” she says of an early job where her American boss asked her to handle factories and suppliers in countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, and India. “I was young then, so I took it as a compliment. I thought my boss was placing a lot of trust in me. But eventually I realized they just wanted me to [handle] the other ‘exotic brown people’ so they wouldn’t have to.”

She now uses the phrase: "Oh my god, you're so exotic," as a chapter title in her book to illustrate how North Africans have to take back the narrative. “I also worked with Harrods, advising them on diversity in terms of how they present brands. That also drove home the point that most corporate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) work is mainly box-ticking,” Koreish tells us.

The critique hits harder because Koreish is no outsider academic. She trained at FIT in New York, became — by her account — National Geographic's youngest menswear designer, making Sir David Attenborough's expedition clothing, then worked at Ralph Lauren menswear and other international brands like Quiksilver and Vans before moving into trend forecasting and, eventually, back to the UK, where she now lectures at Cardiff Metropolitan University in Wales.

The museum exhibit that became a book

Koreish was in Cairo this week for the Egyptian launch of Fashioning North Africa, the book she co-edited with Kent State University Museum curator Sara Hume. Diwan — which is bringing the title to the local market on pre-order — hosted the launch event at Consoleya in downtown Cairo. Koreish, representing her Liberation Collective, participated in a panel with the Egyptian designers featured in the project, among them Reem Atout, Bulga, Almah, Sacer, La Boga, and Saqhoute.

Several of those small independent labels are anchored a few streets away. Bulga, Almah, La Boga, and Saqhoute are tenants of the Nabarawy Fashion Hub, a historic commercial building on Nabarawy Street, once part of downtown's textile and retail district that developer Al Ismaelia acquired in 2018 and restored into a home for independent Egyptian brands. It is the kind of physical anchoring the scene has long lacked, and Koreish points to it as evidence of something coalescing. "If you look in that room," she said of the designers gathered around her, "everyone looks like downtown Cairo" — the new downtown Cairo, increasingly an aesthetic of its own.

The book is the catalog to an exhibition of the same name that ran at the Kent State University Museum in Ohio from September 2025 to May 2026. According to Koreish, it’s the first show of its scale devoted solely to contemporary North African fashion. The exhibit and the book, published by the German house Hirmer, were years in the making. “The exhibit was postponed three times amid the politics around Gaza,” said Koreish. “Ohio, a conservative state, was an unlikely place to debut a project of this nature, but Kent State has one of the largest fashion archives in the US.”

The title is doing deliberate work. “‘Fashioning’ is an active act. It's a human verb of doing,” Koreish explained, rather than a noun that “trivializes it.” “Our culture, especially North Africa, is taken out of context and used willy-nilly,” she said — not only by the obvious culprits. She cites celebrated designers like Zuhair Murad, who lean on “Egyptomania and orientalism without any basis of knowledge,” which she sees as cultural appropriation.

The deeper problem is the absence of a canon

“We have very talented people, we have crafts... but we don't have something people can refer back to,” says Koreish. “We don't have a canon of knowledge.” The sources on Egyptian fashion, she notes, except for Azza Fahmy and a handful of others, “are all Europeans or Americans. None of them are us.”

That is the ambition behind the book. Koreish wants her Liberation Collective, formerly known as Fashion Liberation Collective North Africa, an organization that she founded six years ago, to become “a super agency that's going to build this fashion system and multidisciplinary art system and knowledge base in Egypt and beyond.” Picking apart the origins of where things come from and giving credit where credit is due.

The book, published in October 2025, has been sold around the world and is now part of the libraries of many museums. V&A senior curator Christine Checinska, who led the museum's landmark Africa Fashion show, has ordered it for the institution. Koreish frames her position as someone who is now beyond doing her own designing. “I'm past that. I’m on a broader mission. Now I'm more likely to set fires and let them burn."