{"id":30980,"date":"2022-12-26T10:34:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-26T06:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/me\/?post_type=articles&p=30980"},"modified":"2022-12-26T10:34:23","modified_gmt":"2022-12-26T06:34:23","slug":"palestinian-owned-fashion-brands-nol-collective","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/me\/articles\/palestinian-owned-fashion-brands-nol-collective\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Yasmeen Mjalli, The Palestinian Designer Behind N\u00f6l Collective"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Yasmeen Mjalli and her intersectional fashion brand, N\u00f6l Collective, it all begins and ends with a return to the land. In 2017, the young soon-to-be designer repatriated to her native Palestine after growing up and spending much of her life in the American South with consistent summer trips to visit her grandparents and extended family in Tubas, a vibrant olive green-speckled village, equidistant to Nablus and Jenin and proximal to the Jordan Valley, where many of the local residents go to work by day, tending to the land, only to return to Tubas and homelife by night.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her more recent and permanent move, Mjalli settled in Ramallah, an urban environment starkly different than the village summers she was accustomed to; one that offered more creative space and opportunity, but also more sensory experiences that she wasn\u2019t accustomed to in the US, at least not to the same degree. <\/span>It was one of these foreign experiences, exposure to street harassment, that Mjalli\u2019s first brand BabyFist was born. When asked, Mjalli often describes feeling a sense of shock at the pervasive nature of street harassment in her home country, and as a result, she felt compelled to speak about it, both collectively with others as well as through art.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yasmeen in her studio | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Yasmeen and the owner of the apothecary chatting. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Yasmeen in her studio, testing new dying techniques. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Dye made from Cochineal, a bug native to South and Central America. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div><\/div>\n

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In its first iteration, BabyFist was a radical response. The brand\u2019s principal aim was to rally a call for social and gender equality through a typewriter project where Mjalli set up an installation in the heart of Ramallah and invited the community to share their experiences by typing them out and leaving the pages for others to read. Though the project was wildly successful and hit home with many locals, it wasn\u2019t until Mjalli created an Instagram account, where she shared a photo of a hand-painted denim jacket with the words \u201cnot your habibti\u201d decorating the back, the slogan surrounded by pastel-coloured flowers. From there, her designs took on a life of their own. People began requesting \u201cnot your habibti\u201d jackets at a rate that surprised Mjalli, a sign that her experience and her response to it, resonated with many others.<\/span><\/p>\n

“For Mjalli, the orbit and system behind N\u00f6l will continue to evolve and expand in unexpected ways, but one thing is for sure, no matter what the changes are, everything will always lead back to Palestine.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BabyFist existed as such for three years and, as Mjalli puts it, \u201ccontinuously adapt[ed] and evolve[ed] as it took in new information, new perspective, more nuance\u201d, until September 2020, when she and her team announced not only a name change but also, a shift in creative direction. From this rebirth, N\u00f6l Collective was born. N\u00f6l (\u0646\u0648\u0644) in Arabic means <\/span>loom<\/span><\/i>, and specifically for the collective, it serves as a homage of sorts to the tradition of creating fabrics in Gaza, and the since-destroyed Galilean city of Majdal, before the establishment of Israel and the military occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Raw materials, such as camel and goat hair, or sheep\u2019s wool, were collected and spun into threads before the dyeing process, which for centuries in Palestine, privileged natural dyes from plants, fruits, and herbs before the introduction of more synthetic pigments.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yasmeen and her tailor. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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The tailor does a final press on a newly finished N\u00f6l jacket. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Yasmeen's tailor proudly displaying a new N\u00f6l jacket that he's just finished. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure>
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Yasmeen watches idly as her tailor works on clothing. | Photography: Will Jivcoff<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div><\/div>\n

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In its commitment to transparency, N\u00f6l Collective shared a <\/span>series of NatGeo photos<\/span><\/a> on its Instagram page, documenting the various stages of the Palestinian looming tradition, taken by photographer Thomas Abercrombie in the 1970s. The images are vibrant. They showcase how Palestinian, and by extension, indigenous Mediterranean artisans fashion a living through intergenerational practices on the one hand and use natural and inherently sustainable materials on the other. This practice, <\/span>this tradition<\/span><\/i>\u2014for Mjalli, her team, and local partners\u2014is the core element of what makes the collective tick.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the thing that distinguishes N\u00f6l Collective, despite the emergence of quite a few Palestinian brands since Mjalli\u2019s 2017 launch, is partnership. Mjalli\u2019s ethos is to keep all production \u201chyper-local\u201d and to partner directly with women\u2019s cooperatives, family-run tailor shops, local graphic designers, and more recently, apothecaries and spice shops in Nablus\u2014which have existed for seven generations\u2014for natural dye agents. Mjalli keeps the community behind the production of N\u00f6l\u2019s clothing and jewellery right at the fingertips of her followers. She centres the people who bring a garment or a piece of jewellery to life, documents the process of dying locally sourced silk with orange peels in her kitchen, and tells us exactly where she sources her fabrics; how a jacket is made with dead-stock Syrian silk brocade found in a shop in Jaffa. She talks about those who embroider a top or a pair of trousers. The process is always done with their consent and Mjalli rarely ever speaks except with the collective \u201cwe\u201d. In her words, \u201cif there isn\u2019t a world behind garments, then I don\u2019t want those garments\u201d. For Mjalli, the orbit and system behind N\u00f6l will continue to evolve and expand in unexpected ways, but one thing is for sure, no matter what the changes are, everything will always lead back to Palestine. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31739,"featured_media":30991,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[65,35],"yoast_head":"\nMeet Yasmeen Mjalli, The Palestinian Designer Behind N\u00f6l Collective<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"An insightful look into the Palestinian-owned fashion collective N\u00f6l, and its founder, penned by Suja Sawafta.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/me\/articles\/palestinian-owned-fashion-brands-nol-collective\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Meet Yasmeen 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