Seen in Egypt
Her fabrics are Egyptian, her styles are twists on traditional clothes like the vest and gallabaya. She mixes prints and textures fearlessly, wields a mean asymetric cut and ends up with a jaunty millenial look.
The international fashion world, Amina Khalila points out, has long-since incorporated East Asian and African elements into its design vocabulary, but Egypt's unique colors, designs and fabrics have been ignored.
This 24-year-old Egyptian woman is changing all that.
From the souq
As a girl in Cairo, Amina loved the Wikala, the fabric souq or market. Snaking through its narrow alleyways, she aborbed the colors, the flow of fabric and cascades of fringe and trim. She filled sketch book after sketch book with drawings.
Years later, finishing her degree at American Intercontinental University in London she , with a nudge from her teacher, set aside the idea of doing a collection of evening dresses for a graduation project and went for somethign way edgier and, as this savvy young woman can see, far more commercially viable.
Her presentation attracted attention and so, while wary about her inexperience, decided to go with the momentum. Instead of staying in London where she would be one in a million designers "trading their right arm" to get the attention of a major fasion magazine, she went against the trend of her well-educated Egyptian peers and set off, back to Cairo.
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Amina K.'s shop-in shop at the Cairo Four Seasons Nile Plaza
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To the Four Seasons...
"Egypt is changing," she says. Its affluent young are more sophisticated than before; there is a critical mass of other young creatives in the city to mix-things up and, as ever, there is a small but well-heeled sgment of the Egyptian market that turns out to be intrigued by an adventurous look, especially when produced by one of their own.
With support from her father, who encouraged her to follow her passion; her mother, who looks after the mysterious details of setting up a business in Egypt and major Egyptian magazines like Pashion and Enigma which use phrases like " incredibly talented," she is off and running.
Five local shops-in-shops, including Cairo Four Seasons Nile Plaza, carry her line.
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 Amina with her
thesis on the use
of traditional
design and stitchery work
of Bedouin women
in high fashion.
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And back
She supports as she is being supported. She buys only Egyptian made fabrics and employs only Egyptian seamstresses. Not a surprise when you learn that she wrote her graduation thesis on NGO projects with Bedouin women who learned to make their needlework commercially viable and themselves, for the first time, cash contributors to their household economy.
Hard not to hope that Amina K will have similar satisfactions as reinventor of fashion design in Egypt.
See her collections at AminaK.net
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