Fashion

In Conversation With the Sister Duo Behind Touchless, FTA’s Technology Award Winners

BYKhaoula Ghanem

November 27, 2025

Fashion has always had room for strong sister duos. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen built The Row into a benchmark of understatement, while Kate and Laura Mulleavy turned Rodarte into a cult favorite for conceptual Americana, and Simone and Nicky Zimmermann made Australian resortwear global. Today, another sister duo is entering the chat, but instead of working in silk, organza, or couture lace, they’re working with 3D printers.

Meet Dalal and Fatema Alkhaja, the Bahraini founders of Touchless, the accessories brand redefining what it means to design, manufacture, and scale bags in the age of fashion tech. This year, the sisters took home the 2025 Fashion Trust Arabia (FTA) Technology Award, winning against a category of emerging regional innovators pushing the future of production.

Their bags aren’t crafted in leather workshops or traditional ateliers. Instead, they’re 3D-printed, engineered from custom polymers, and shaped with product-design precision. “We design through engineering,” they say. “Every surface, every opening, every volume has to work. It has to feel like it was made for the body, not just made for a museum.” And yet, the most surprising thing about Touchless isn’t how futuristic it looks, but how familiar it feels.

“People expect 3D-printed bags to be stiff or too futuristic, but ours are ultra lightweight, comfortable and genuinely wearable,” Dalal and Fatema tell MILLE. That usability was a deciding factor for the FTA judges, who praised how the pieces read as collectible objects but function like everyday accessories. As one judge remarked, “Your designs feel so relatable it makes me want to own one.”

That balance between art and usability is what has pushed Touchless from a Bahrain-based experiment to products stocked by luxury retailers. Their bags are already carried at Level Shoes, Harvey Nichols, and Tryano, and were highlighted by Selfridges during Paris Fashion Week. In an industry where “fashion tech” can easily veer into gimmick, Touchless has landed somewhere rare: innovative, but commercially scalable.

The duo’s design philosophy prioritizes engineering over embellishment. Their silhouettes aren’t imagined as accessories first, but built like hardware. Each bag is printed in components, then sanded, finished, and tested repeatedly for structure, weight, and durability. The result is a bag that feels less like an experiment and more like the way accessories may eventually be made across the luxury market.

That technical depth helped them stand out at FTA, where they presented among leading regional designers in front of editors, executives, and global decision-makers. “Honestly, it didn’t sink in at first,” they recall. “Standing there with industry icons made everything feel foggy. It felt like the beginning of a new chapter for us as a family and as a brand.”

With their award, the sisters are focusing on infrastructure, not hype. “We want to expand our team, upgrade our machinery, and invest more in our closed-loop recycling system,” they explain, highlighting that sustainability for them isn’t messaging, it’s a production requirement. Better machinery means less waste, more precision, and faster prototyping.

“Our clients have a personal relationship with the shapes,” say the sisters. The next step is evolving that relationship through a more robust product experience, tighter production control, and new silhouettes.

In Conversation With the Sister Duo Behind Touchless, FTA’s Technology Award Winners

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In Conversation With the Sister Duo Behind Touchless, FTA’s Technology Award Winners

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