There’s a certain audacity in dreaming big from a place that rarely makes space for it. Ramallah, the de facto cultural capital of the West Bank, is one such place. A city hemmed in by checkpoints and the constant surveillance of military occupation, is, as Ayham Hassan says, “a weird f***ing city,” half-laughing. “Excuse my language. But it’s true. It’s kind of free, but not really. You leave and you see cameras everywhere, checkpoints, soldiers. And then you come back home like it’s nothing.”
A Palestinian designer raised in Ramallah and now based between London and his hometown, Hassan’s journey reads like something out of a film. “I come from a working-class family in Palestine. It’s not a fashion background by any means,” he tells me early in the conversation. The house he grew up in was busy and multigenerational. His grandmother, who is Colombian, lived with them for fifteen years, bringing with her a new language, new tastes, and a different sense of rhythm. It was a household that valued education, structure, and duty, but one where creativity—though not formalized—was always present in some form.
And yet, fashion— or more accurately, self-expression as a form of survival— was always around. Weddings in Palestine, for instance, aren’t just social events, they’re spectacles, rituals of resistance. “It’s like Oscars week in Arab culture,” he muses. “People show up. You notice everything, the way they walk, talk, dress. It’s theatre.”
That lens— part anthropologist, part dreamer— formed the early blueprint for his design language. He was twelve when Lady Gaga and the golden age of Arab pop reigned supreme; YouTube became his portal; And he consumed everything: music videos, reality shows like Star Academy, and the dark, conceptual magic of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. “I didn’t even know what fashion was. I thought it was expression, like film. It felt like storytelling with plot twists and climax scenes.”
He didn’t get his hands on a fashion magazine until he was nearly 20— a British Vogue brought back from Turkey by a friend. But the absence of traditional access never stopped him from creating a world of his own. In Ramallah, even accessing Jerusalem, just an hour away, is a rare privilege and Hassan has only been once.
For most people in his position, the future rarely stretched beyond the next checkpoint. The idea of becoming a fashion designer—let alone one who would go on to show at Central Saint Martins, with his work published in British Vogue and picked up by Dazed—was not just far-fetched, it was unimaginable. And yet, the designer not only imagined it, he made it happen. Not through connections or access, but through raw, relentless belief in the power of expression—fashion, in his case—as a way of holding space for joy and pain in the same breath.
His early experiments with design began at Birzeit University, where he enrolled in a design degree with no real roadmap. It was there he met Omar Nasser, a mentor who had studied in London and introduced him to the idea that fashion wasn’t just fantasy, it could be a viable path. A rebellious one, sure. But a path nonetheless. “I remember saying to my tutor, ‘I’m obsessed with McQueen, I want to be like him. But obviously, I want to be myself.’”
Self, that elusive, ever-evolving thing, is what Hassan’s work circles around. His first designs weren’t about Palestine per se, but conversations with his own body, his community, and the constraints placed on both. Queerness, gender, desire, identity. “Those were the topics everyone my age was talking about. Not always publicly, but intensely. So my work was raw. It was more about what I was going through than any polished technique.”
He started sketching, slowly, while studying design at Birzeit University, a place he credits with giving him the political and intellectual tools to connect the dots between space, identity, and expression. That’s where he first dared to name his dream aloud: Central Saint Martins.
But applying was a different kind of war. “The process took a year,” he says. “Just figuring out what a portfolio was, what a personal statement should include. I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew and start from scratch.” His projects were provocative— they tackled topics rarely broached, let alone celebrated, in a place like Ramallah. But his approach wasn’t calculated, just reactive and honest. “I didn’t have any technical skills. I didn’t come from a pattern-cutting background. But I had experience. I had something to say.”
He got in. Which, statistically, should’ve been impossible. Only 6% of applicants are accepted into the BA Womenswear course at CSM. From the Arab world, it’s usually one student a year— rarely from Palestine. “Even when I told my family, they were like, ‘Great… but how are we going to pay for this?’” he laughs. Tuition was over £45,000, not including rent, visas, or survival. “It’s half a million shekels. That’s someone’s dowry, someone’s life savings.”
When all institutional doors shut— including every cultural fund in Palestine— Hassan turned to the last thing he had left: the internet. “Crowdfunding was the last option. I had nothing to lose.” He didn’t expect much. He didn’t know how to ask. But the campaign went viral. Dazed picked up the story, Bella Hadid reposted it, contributions poured in from strangers across the world— $5, $10, a message of encouragement, a tag of solidarity. “That was the real validation,” he says. “Even more than getting into CSM. People believed in me. People wanted me to go.”
He went.
Central Saint Martins lived up to its reputation. It was intense, transformative, often disillusioning. “It’s not just a BA,” he says. “It tests every part of you— physically, mentally, creatively. It’s beautiful and brutal.” But it gave him space to research, to experiment, to fall apart and come back sharper.
Until October 7.
His graduate collection, titled IM-MORTAL MAGENTA, was developed during one of the darkest periods in recent Palestinian history. Following the events of Oct. 7, the escalation in Gaza reached unprecedented levels. Tens of thousands were killed, whole neighborhoods were flattened, and families were erased. He couldn’t design for months.
“How do you create anything beautiful when people are being slaughtered?” he asks, not rhetorically. “I’d go back home and delete my Instagram. Hide my posts. Then I’d come back to class and pretend I was okay.” The grief was compounded by silence— institutional silence, peer discomfort, the sickly politics of neutrality. “I was waiting for someone to ask how I was. Just to check in. Because I’m Palestinian. But most didn’t.”
Still, he had to finish his degree. He had a visa to keep and a promise to fulfill. He threw himself into research, focusing on Gaza— a place he’d never been, despite its proximity. “It’s only an hour and a half away from Ramallah. I’ve never met anyone from there. That’s how divided we are by design.”
His graduate collection became a love letter and a protest, an archive and an offering. IM-MORTAL MAGENTA, anchored by the color magenta, used traditional embroidery motifs from Gaza, colors pulled from Majdal weaving techniques, talismanic jewelry references, and three-meter-long silhouettes inspired by Bedouin dresses. It was joyful, devastating, and proud all at once.
He worked with eight Palestinian women to bring it to life, including artisans from Ramallah, Jerusalem, and scattered villages. His mother even contributed by knitting, meanwhile his aunties helped source fabric. Everything had to be smuggled from Palestine to Jordan, then to London. “Sometimes it took weeks for a single piece of embroidery to reach me,” he says. “But it was worth it.”
Each piece in the collection had its own emotional logic. A pleated paper corset spoke to fragility; a buffed leather jacket embroidered with glitch motifs referenced censorship and surveillance; a hand-knit scarf made with wool from a Ramallah shop, stitched by his mother, grounded the collection in intimacy. And then there was the finale—a sweeping dress of magenta silk chiffon, inspired by a traditional Bedouin pocket dress, so light it almost disappeared in motion.
At the CSM press show, Hassan was selected to present his collection on the main runway. The issue? “L’Oréal sponsored it,” Hassan recalls bluntly. “They donated millions to Israel, and now they’re funding my graduation?” He considered pulling out. “But I told myself— this collection is too beautiful to be ignored; it deserves that stage.”
The models, many of whom were Arab, felt the tension too and they asked if they could make a statement. The designer didn’t even need to explain. They wrote “Free Palestine” and “Boycott L’Oréal” across their palms and raised them on the runway. “I didn’t ask them to. That was their choice. But I supported it. One hundred percent.”
The school didn’t reprimand him, but the discomfort was palpable. “No one told me off. But you could feel it— the passive-aggressiveness. The looking away.” Still, British Vogue posted the looks, unfiltered. Dazed followed suit. The message— embroidered, embodied, undeniable— made it through.
Since then, Hassan’s work has been featured in Vogue, Dazed, i-D, and beyond. Most recently, he was named the 2025 recipient of the BFC x NET-A-PORTER & MR PORTER Education Fund—an award that places him among the most promising emerging designers globally. It’s a huge achievement, but Hassan is quick to put it into perspective. “This was just my BA,” he says. “I haven’t even started yet.”
The next step? A label, eventually. But also something deeper: infrastructure. He wants to build a platform that connects London and Ramallah, that brings Palestinian artisans into international production cycles, that honors their knowledge while giving them economic stability.
Even now, as he considers what’s next—whether it’s launching his own label or building a new design ecosystem rooted in collaboration and craft—he’s not chasing clout, and he’s certainly not interested in being boxed in by tokenism. What he’s doing is deeply personal, shaped by lived experience, and rooted in something much more complex than visibility or recognition.
“I do have a sense of responsibility,” he says. “But Palestine will always be an extension of me. I lived there, and I’m going to keep living there. It comes through in the way I speak, in how I think. People in Palestine think differently because of what they go through.”
He talks about emotions that don’t quite translate—feelings shaped by the particularities of life under occupation, moments that don’t sit neatly within language. “People don’t go through these things unless they live them,” he explains. “So yes, of course there’s a responsibility to speak about it. But I also wanted to make space for something that isn’t shown very often. This isn’t a memorial. It’s a response to a genocide. And still, I wanted to express something else too—joy, beauty, resilience.”
His graduate collection, he says, was about holding that tension. It was about acknowledging what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, while also making room for pride and for care. “That’s part of life there too,” he says. “The rhythm of things can be very disorienting. You hear about a martyr being killed, and then there’s a wedding in the neighborhood. People grieve and celebrate in the same breath. That duality is real.”
What Hassan wanted to capture wasn’t grief as spectacle, but the ongoing act of staying present and making something with your hands, even when things fall apart. “I’m not interested in using Palestine to gain attention,” he says. “I just want to do the work and explore what I was already exploring back home—craft, embroidery, the stories that live in fabric.”
His final collection was a continuation of that. “This was a way of thinking about Gaza not only through destruction, but through the people who still create. The people who wove magenta, those are the same people experiencing all of this. And their work, their knowledge, is still here,” he notes.
For Hassan, that’s what matters: the quiet insistence that even amid uncertainty, there’s still value in making. And that how something is made—who it’s made with, where it comes from—can carry as much meaning as the thing itself.
Sharon Rose: Casting and Muse @sharonrose.fm
Alia Aluli: Stylist & Image consultant @alulliiii
Bea Sweet: Key Makeup Artist @beasweetbeauty
Shamara Roper: Key hairstylist @shamara_rope
Tutors: Heather Sproat, Anna-nicole Ziesch
Mentor: Omar joseph Nasser-Khourey
Main Helpers: @kenansleviraa & @rubyy.stott
