Sasha Nassar's designs. Photo by Patrice Stable
Sasha Nasser's designs Photo by Patrice Stable
It happened a few days before Sasha Nassar was supposed to travel to London, last June, to represent her school − the Paris branch of Italy’s Marangoni fashion institute − at an international competition for graduating students of design. After working day and night on her collection, Nassar, a 26-year-old native of Jaffa, was asked to make extensive changes. Her team of mentors, which included various outside experts, recommended that she expand the collection she had created − featuring six long dresses inspired by the Arab Spring and by what she sees as the resultant changes in the image of women in Muslim society − by adding items such as slacks. In the mentors’ opinion, the collection in its current form lacked interest. Even Nassar’s personal advisor, who had accompanied and supported her throughout the entire work process, began to think the team was right.
A sewing machine that breaks down at a critical moment, a rogue pattern that doesn’t work according to the way it was originally drawn, or a disagreement between a young designer and his or her team of mentors − the training students undergo at fashion design schools abroad is generally full of drama and crises. But the height of the drama is undoubtedly reserved for the moments before they arrive at the finish line.
Exhausted after a week of intensive around-the-clock work, an upset Nassar wanted an hour to mull over advisors’ new recommendations.
“I left the school, walked around the city and went out in search of the sea and wind of Jaffa. I had to get some air,” she recounts, during a recent visit to Israel. After an hour of thinking, and quite a bit of crying, she returned to confront them with her decision. “I informed them that I had decided to be brave and reject their recommendation. I truly believed in what I had done, and it really hurt that they had demanded that I change it.”
Lengthy negotiations ensued, and at the end, a compromise was reached. It was agreed that Nassar would make tiny alterations to her designs, for example by lengthening the hems or by interweaving lacy fabrics in some of them. In retrospect, says Nassar, she is very glad she insisted on not changing the collection.
Part of the reason for that, of course, may be that, ultimately, Nassar won the competition, although she found out about it in a strange way: “At the end of the fashion show, I went straight back to Paris, and the judges were supposed to announce the winner at the end of the day. In the evening I checked online and found an article in New York Magazine that mentioned my name among the three graduates who stood out in the competition. I nodded to myself and carried on.”
By the next evening, still, no one had contacted her, and her partner suggested that she do an online search for her name. One of the hits was an article announcing that she had won the competition. “It said at the end that MUUSE was looking forward to working with the young designer Sasha Nassar − I was in shock and very excited.”
MUUSE is an international fashion enterprise based in Copenhagen, which showcases limited collections that are created each season in collaboration with promising young talents. As part of the prize she won in June, Nassar was chosen to create a capsule collection for the brand, with full funding. That collection was shown during Paris Fashion Week late last month, which featured clothes for
the 2014 spring-summer season − which are now for sale on the brand’s website.
Nassar says the collection includes such basic items as shirts, skirts and pants, as well as dresses, all bearing the original printed fabrics she developed for her graduation collection.
Of the collection’s six dresses, two are semi-sheer burqa styles without sleeves, which envelop the body like a cocoon and reveal the wearer’s eyes and palms through delicate white mesh and lace fabrics. Nassar was inspired when creating the printed fabrics, in shades of black and white, by motifs borrowed from Muslim culture, into which she also incorporated Arabic numerals that represent the dates on which protests erupted in Arab countries. The designs of the four remaining
dresses derived from those of the burqas, which are long and modest but do not include the head covers, and altogether the collection can be seen as representing the transition from a traditional Muslim garment to contemporary Western-style clothing, with all its fashionable and seductive elements. All incorporate substantial pieces of lace with romantic floral motifs.
In one dress, whose top has been designed as a wide-sleeved blouse, while its bottom is a long narrow skirt, Nassar worked in pieces of black lace in the chest area and below as well, in abstract shapes that bring to mind oil stains or perhaps scorch marks caused by burning the cloth. The choice to expose the body at these strategic places is not accidental, of course: In the tension between uncovering and covering the body, the cultural conflict that Nassar sought to represent is epitomized.
Another dress blends a dense geometric pattern in black and white, reminiscent of a keffiyeh print, with pieces of white floral lace sewn onto black cloth. Here, the tension is purely formal, and by means of playing with diagonal cuts and the right balance between the fabrics’ patterns, Nassar manages to arouse interest and a feeling of dynamism in a dress that has a simple silhouette.
The remaining two designs follow Nassar’s axis of movement from traditional Muslim garb to Western fashion; at the London show, Muslim prayer beads adorned the models’ necks. Ordinarily, such an element risks being overly explicit or theatrical, but one of Nassar’s outstanding achievements is without a doubt her ability to express certain ideas subtly and to create a desirable wardrobe that speaks an up-to-date language.
The maturity evident in her collection is impressive, and in fact it has its roots in the courses Nassar took, in which, among other things, she excelled at carefully listening to her inner voice. Her education in fashion design began in 2009 at Marangoni in Milan, where she went in pursuit of a childhood dream to live there conceived during a previous visit to the city. She soon discovered, however, that dreams are one thing and reality another. It took her just three months to realize that she wanted to relocate to London, where her brother lives, and continue studying at the school’s British campus.
But there, too, in her second year, she had doubts. “I got scared. I met so many people who had finished these studies and then gone back to waiting tables that I felt I was wasting my time, and I sunk into a depression that lasted throughout the year. I shared my concerns with my parents, and my father suggested I take a break for a year.”
Nassar returned to Israel in 2011, and, indeed, worked as a waitress. “After two months, things looked completely different: Instead of the burden I felt during school, I suddenly began appreciating its possibilities without denigrating it so much ...”
But when she wanted to go back and finish her third year at Marangoni in London, she discovered that she could not: The English branch, in the meantime, received university accreditation, so she was told she had to resume her studies at its Paris branch. At the time, this was a tumultuous change that compelled her to adapt, once again, to a new place and language. In retrospect today, however, Nassar is glad she had an opportunity to experience each of the cities, with their different concepts and attitude toward haute couture.
Nassar: “I took the good things from each place. From Milan, I took a bit of the dullness. There is something very rigid about the teachers there. They always asked for something that was clear and correct. In London, you ostensibly get the freedom to do whatever you like, but not really. In Paris, I met an amazing teacher who was attentive to my wishes and wasn’t afraid to go all the way with my stuff. He always accompanied me and yet in the end left me room to do what I wanted.”
But with all that, she says now, she learned more in the single month of working on the capsule collection for MUUSE than in all three years at the Marangoni schools: “Obviously I am as delighted as I can be and grateful for this opportunity I’ve been given, and hope that this collaboration will continue.”
Nassar is currently working on a separate collection in collaboration with an acquaintance from London who is founding an independent brand, and in the near future is hoping to take part in a proper internship at an established fashion house in Paris − such as Balmain, for example. Still, she would like to live in Israel again eventually, “in Jaffa close to the sea,” Nassar says.
“I think about it a lot and it seems to me that once I’ve worked abroad for a while and understand how things go there, I’ll want to come back here. In the meantime, I get to suffer a little more in Paris,” she adds with a grin.
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