Fashion

Meet Alaa Alaradi, FTA’s Breakout Debut Designer

BYKhaoula Ghanem

November 26, 2025

Few fashion figures championed emerging voices quite like Franca Sozzani, the late editor-in-chief of Vogue Italia, who famously used the pages of a major fashion magazine to platform risk, controversy, and raw creative beginnings. So when Fashion Trust Arabia (FTA) introduced the Franca Sozzani Debut Talent Award, the intention was clear: support designers before the industry decides who they should be. This year’s winner, Alaa Alaradi, embodies exactly that kind of promise.

The Bahraini designer walked onstage to accept her award from Anna Wintour, a sentence she still delivers with a hint of disbelief. “I thought my heart was going to drop,” she recalls to MILLE. “I started fast walking because I thought to myself I shouldn’t make Anna wait long on the stage, and then the rest was a complete blur.” She laughs about it now, particularly the surprise of who was sitting in the audience: “They don’t tell you that Anna Wintour is giving the prize or that Miuccia Prada will be present.”

For Alaradi, the value of the award isn’t the moment, but the structure that comes after. “The financial support and mentorship will lay down a very important foundation for the future,” she explains. “I truly want to prove that the FTA fund and support is essential in our community, and don’t take it lightly or for granted.”

That emphasis on foundation is key. Alaradi isn’t positioning her work around loose narratives or commercial proposals; she approaches design as material instinct. “My approach to design is sculptural and not conceptual,” she says. “I go about my work very instinctively and genuinely hoped they would notice that through the garments and pieces rather than a concept pitch.”

Born in Bahrain and raised between the Gulf and Switzerland, the budding designer pursued fashion with the support of her older sister Noor. She went on to intern at Saint Laurent and Acne Studios, two houses known for precision and construction, before completing her master’s at HEAD – Geneva in 2024. There, she developed a visual vocabulary centered on shape, movement, and sculptural draping, culminating in her graduate collection, Further Deeper Softer Closer.

Her silhouettes barely graze the body, then unexpectedly sculpt around it. Sheer textiles trace the torso with a kind of quiet confidence; molten metal jewelry wraps around fingers and collarbones as if formed directly on the skin. Pieces float, cling, and reveal; not to shock, but to feel. And if the clothes look effortlessly sexy, it’s because they’re not engineered to seduce. They are simply honest with the body, they move with instinct like the kind of woman she designs for. Or, as she puts it, “people that go with how it feels, not what it is.” That philosophy, paired with the technical groundwork she’s now set to build, is exactly what makes the Franca Sozzani Debut Talent Award feel appropriate.

When asked onstage whether she had a brand yet, she answered honestly: “I don’t have one yet.” Moderator Leonardo Lawson stepped in with the line that will likely follow her for the next decade: “You don’t have a brand, you are a brand.”

Meet Alaa Alaradi, FTA’s Breakout Debut Designer

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Meet Alaa Alaradi, FTA’s Breakout Debut Designer

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