Fall/Winter '26 "In Divine Trust"

Trashy Clothing works from lived reality rather than symbolism. The clothes do not represent absurdity. They are shaped by it. Weight, restraint, and control are not metaphors here. They are conditions translated into form.

Living in Occupied Palestine means existing inside a structure that constantly contradicts itself. Military logic sits beside daily life and never quite fits. Surveillance next to salons. Checkpoints beside gyms. Armed control interrupting farming, errands, intimacy, rest. Nothing is theatrical, yet everything feels staged. Over time, this imbalance becomes ordinary. That banality is where the absurd lives.

The collection draws structural inspiration from Divine Intervention by Elia Suleiman, particularly his use of stillness and the gaze. In one scene, two people wait at a red traffic light. One Palestinian. One Israeli settler. No soldiers. No weapons. Just a look. The imbalance remains intact. The gaze is not mutual, even if it appears symmetrical. One looks with assumed authority. The other looks without asking permission. That quiet refusal destabilizes the scene.

Suleiman shows how occupation does not need action to exist. It is embedded in everyday gestures. Waiting. Watching. Being watched. When the expected performance of fear or explanation does not arrive, authority begins to feel exposed.

That logic carries into the clothes and the way they move. The silhouettes hold restraint without submission. Tailoring is controlled, deliberate, and often weighted. Garments sit close to the body or hold space around it, asking the wearer to inhabit tension rather than perform it. Humor runs through the collection as a mode of survival rather than commentary. Calm appears where reaction is expected. Composure arrives in the wrong context. This is a long standing Palestinian way of navigating absurd conditions without theatricality.

The looks operate as interruptions of daily life. Each model appears mid crossing, mid routine, mid delay. Not archetypes, not symbols, but fragments of lived presence. Each body carries a different relationship to visibility, risk, confidence, and time, yet all move through the same structure. The clothes do not explain this structure. They move within it.

This movement echoes the scene in Divine Intervention where a woman crosses a checkpoint without acknowledging the soldiers. She does not negotiate, explain, or react. Authority collapses not through confrontation, but through irrelevance. The system remains present, but it is no longer centered.

Jewelry from Sheytan by Mia Khalifa appears throughout the show as structure rather than ornament, shaped through ongoing dialogue with Trashy Clothing. Sword motifs recur across the body as protection, worn as chains, pendants, belts, and pearl inlay wood. Two swords becoming one.

Mia represents the woman and the man Trashy Clothing designs for through strength, political awareness, and a sharp sense of wit. Her presence carries confidence without spectacle and power without aggression, holding visibility as something owned rather than negotiated.

The clothes operate in the same way. They move without explanation. They do not announce intention or wait to be interpreted. Like the figures that wear them, they exist within the structure without centering it.

If the show leaves you with a feeling rather than an answer, it is worth tracing the language that helped translate lived experience into form. The work carries the influence of Naji al-Ali, Yehya Saadeh, Annemarie Jacir, Sharif Waked, Raeda Saadeh, Suad Amiry, and the language of strength embedded in Arab pop culture through figures like Haifa Wehbe. These are not citations. They are part of the same reality this collection comes from.

FW26 Runway Film