Fashion

Suad Al Fardan Is the Emirati Designer Making Sequins From Fish Scales

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 16, 2026

The answer Suad Al Fardan had spent weeks looking for was swimming in front of her. It was her final year of university, and the Emirati designer was juggling her thesis with a corporate job and the relentless commute between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Her attempts to create a more sustainable alternative to the plastic sequin had already taken her through pomegranate skins, which moulded, and silk, which didn’t behave quite how she needed it to. After one particularly difficult week, she drove to Saadiyat and sat beside the water. “There were tiny fish alive and swimming right by the shore, and the light was catching their scales. I immediately thought: sequins,” she recalls to MILLE. “It was almost funny because I had spent so much time trying to find the answer, and the second I finally relaxed, it was literally swimming in front of me.”

That flash of light on the water would eventually become Illumire, Al Fardan’s Abu Dhabi-based material venture turning discarded fish scales into fashion-grade embellishments. Founded in 2023, the project has since taken her from UAE fish markets to exhibitions, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week and, most remarkably, a three-month placement inside Oscar de la Renta in New York after she was selected as a winner of the Design Commission Abu Dhabi x Oscar de la Renta residency. It is a rather extraordinary itinerary for something that began life as food waste, although Al Fardan has always had a habit of seeing possibility in places other people might overlook.

Al Fardan grew up with her mother’s atelier inside the family home, giving her the sort of informal education that happens through proximity rather than textbooks. By 16, she was photographing content on an iPhone 6, recruiting friends to model, speaking with clients, and helping organize exhibitions. “I was learning about design and media without even realizing how much it was preparing me for my future,” she says. Material innovation arrived much later, almost by accident. “I never imagined that I would enter this side of the industry, but now I can’t imagine my career without it.”

There were other lessons happening at home, too. Clothes were expressive, dressing up was an occasion in itself, and details mattered. Growing up Emirati meant embellishment was hardly an abstract design concept. It appeared in embroidery, jewelry, traditional dress, weddings, and Eid, while her mother’s atelier offered a backstage view of the labor required to produce all that beauty. Eventually, Al Fardan began paying as much attention to how those details were made as she did to how they looked. “I became fascinated by the work behind the details, the embroidery, the materials, and the craftsmanship,” she explains. “Looking back, it makes a lot of sense that I eventually found myself creating an embellishment of my own.”

The sequin made an especially compelling target. Fashion has spent years interrogating the environmental footprint of fabrics, packaging, and production, while one of its smallest components has largely escaped the same scrutiny. Conventional sequins are typically punched from petroleum-based plastics such as PVC or PET, according to Illumire’s research, leaving tiny pieces that are difficult to recycle once attached to garments. For Al Fardan, there was something unsettling about the lifespan of an object designed for such fleeting moments of pleasure.

“What really bothered me was that we had simply accepted being adorned in plastic for every occasion, big or small,” she says. “You could wear a garment covered in plastic sequins once or twice, but those sequins could remain in our environment long after us. The idea that something could be part of our lives for such a short amount of time but remain in the environment for generations genuinely horrified me.” Her thesis therefore began with a deceptively straightforward question: could she find another way?

Finding one turned her apartment kitchen into an improvised laboratory. After finishing work at her corporate job, Al Fardan would head directly into the kitchen and experiment until midnight, testing formulations and treatments repeatedly. The glamour associated with sequins was decidedly absent from these early prototypes. “A mess!” is how she remembers it. “The first fish-scale experiment was probably the worst. I genuinely thought I had managed to remove the fishy smell. I very quickly discovered that I had not! The smell stuck to everything for days.”

She persisted until her fifth sample finally worked. “There is something very special to me now about looking at where Illumire is and remembering that it really started with me making a complete mess in my kitchen.”

Today, the process is considerably more refined, although it remains intensely manual. Discarded scales are collected from local UAE markets, cleaned and prepared before being treated with Al Fardan’s bio-based formulation. They cure for roughly 24 to 48 hours before each sequin is individually cut and hole-punched by hand. A 30-by-30-centimeter sheet produces around 500 sequins, with cutting alone taking approximately five hours. From there, they can be individually embroidered onto garments or combined with pearls, crystals, stones, and other forms of embellishment.

Look closely and the material still betrays its origins. The scales catch light with an irregular pearlescence, their surfaces carrying tiny differences in texture, translucency and reflection. Illumire has deliberately retained those inconsistencies, meaning no two sequins are completely identical. The effect can be surprisingly opulent. On a powder-blue dress, the scales mingle with freshwater pearls and crystals until distinguishing one from another becomes difficult; elsewhere, they cascade vertically down flowing modest silhouettes or gather into shell-like formations across black eveningwear. “Nature had essentially created its own version of a sequin,” Al Fardan says. “I just needed to find a way to work with it.”

There is also something satisfyingly circular about an object associated with glamour beginning its life in a waste pile. “I love that something people would normally throw away without thinking twice can become something they want to wear and treasure,” she says. For Al Fardan, the differences between individual scales are part of their appeal. “In the same way that we’re all different and carry our own stories, the scales do too. I don’t want to remove that individuality. It’s part of what makes the material special.”

Its geography matters just as much as its biology. Illumire currently sources, develops and produces its material within the UAE, keeping its supply chain deliberately local. The sea that provided Al Fardan with her initial idea also carries a much older significance in the Emirates, where fishing and pearling sustained coastal communities long before oil transformed the country’s economy. For a designer whose work revolves around reconsidering value, turning another marine material into adornment creates an intriguing contemporary echo.

“Illumire really is a piece of Abu Dhabi,” she says. “Our relationship with the sea and fishing has been incredibly important throughout our history, and I love being able to carry a small part of that forward in a completely different way.” The connection, she stresses, was never manufactured as a branding exercise. “The material comes from our sea, it is produced here, and the original idea came to me sitting on the shore of Saadiyat. So when someone holds an Illumire piece, they’re quite literally holding a little piece of Abu Dhabi in the palm of their hand. From our sea to the world.”

The world part began arriving sooner than expected. Illumire’s first exhibition with Design Commission Abu Dhabi was the moment Al Fardan began seeing the project outside the protective boundaries of university. Strangers could encounter the material without knowing the months of experimentation behind it, and their reactions ranged from skepticism to immediate belief. Some were convinced it would remain a thesis project; others seemed unsurprised when it continued to grow.

Then came an opportunity that Al Fardan first heard about from her mother: the DCAD x Oscar de la Renta residency. She applied with Illumire as the centerpiece of her submission and was ultimately selected as one of three UAE-based designers for the program. The symmetry was difficult to miss. Oscar de la Renta had been one of the houses she and her mother watched together when Al Fardan was growing up, particularly during the founder’s lifetime. Years later, the girl watching those collections from Abu Dhabi would walk through the doors of its New York atelier carrying a material she had invented in her kitchen.

“It was surreal being somewhere I had admired from afar for so long,” she recalls. “Illumire began with me experimenting in my kitchen in Abu Dhabi, so every time it takes me somewhere I once dreamed about, I have that moment of looking back and thinking about how far a wild idea can actually take you.”

Her three months at the house took her through ready-to-wear, fabrics, and couture, although the latter felt immediately familiar. Al Fardan spent time learning more about bridal and kaftans, but she found herself particularly captivated by the embroidery happening inside the atelier. “When you love embellishment, being able to watch that level of craftsmanship up close teaches you things that are difficult to understand from a classroom or a screen.”

That commitment to handwork has become one of the tensions Illumire will have to negotiate as it grows. Al Fardan wants the material to reach international fashion houses, yet every sequin currently requires human hands, time, and patience. She resists treating that as a flaw that needs engineering out of the process.

“For me, growth doesn’t have to mean losing craftsmanship,” she says. “Eventually, that can mean building a larger team and passing on the techniques, but I don’t think the answer is removing the human element completely. The handmade nature of Illumire is part of its story and part of what makes every piece different.”

For now, perhaps the most reliable measure of the project’s success is considerably simpler: people still cannot quite believe what they are looking at. The question Al Fardan hears most often is whether the material smells, which she finds particularly funny given the fate of that unfortunate first batch in her kitchen. Others simply stare, trying to reconcile the luminous embellishment in front of them with the fish scales they know.

“I think that’s one of my favourite parts of Illumire,” she says. “It makes people look twice.”

Suad Al Fardan Is the Emirati Designer Making Sequins From Fish Scales

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