For Palestinian designer Ayham Hassan, fashion has always been more than clothing. It is survival stitched into fabric. From sketching pop icons in his teenage bedroom to draping garments rusted with nails salvaged from his uncle’s destroyed home, Ayham has built a design language rooted in resilience. Now, with his graduate collection Immortal Magenta for Central Saint Martins, he stands at the intersection of grief and resistance, stitching together the story of Palestine with threads of defiance.
A Collection Born from Memory and Defiance
At the heart of his collection is magenta—a color that doesn’t exist in the spectrum. Our brains invent it to fill the gap between red and violet.
“The color doesn’t exist, but our resistance does,” he says. For years, he leaned into dark tones, but with Immortal Magenta, he chose to celebrate resilience instead of only mourning. For the first time, he imagined a future filled with ambition, not just survival.
Magenta became his banner: a synthetic color, made real through collective imagination—just like the dream of liberation.
Six Looks, Six Stories
Each of Ayham’s six looks is both garment and testimony, rooted in ancestral techniques like tessreem patchwork, Majdalawi weaving, and cross-stitch embroidery, created with the help of women artisans in the West Bank.
Look 1
Represents claustrophobia, with magenta fabric wrapping tightly around the body to reflect the suffocating weight of occupation.
Look 2
Inspired by the act of jumping a checkpoint, with ripped clothes symbolizing violence and a scarf that carries the touch of many Palestinian hands—knitted by his mother, neighbors, and friends together, turning the piece into a collective gesture of love and resilience.
Look 3
Draws from the late Ottoman period, layered with silver metal to create a warrior-like suit, blending history with the language of resistance.
Look 4
Takes inspiration from the slingshot used by Palestinian children to resist soldiers, constructed from rubber bands. The piece was built directly on the model, alien and powerful at 15 kilos, and completed with vintage McQueen heels, a tribute to his first inspiration.
Look 5
Reimagines the press jacket as a puffer, reflecting how journalists became warriors during genocide, with intricate embroidery, pleated paper, and metallic embellishment highlighting both fragility and strength.
Look 6
Inspired by the Majdalawi thoub, featuring a shawl embroidered by eight Palestinian women, glowing in magenta as a collective act of resilience and cultural survival.
Discovering Fashion in Ramallah
As a boy in Ramallah, Ayham wasn’t dreaming of catwalks. He was fascinated by expression—how people decorated their bags, how identity was expressed through fashion.
At 12, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance stopped him in his tracks. Alexander McQueen’s shows, with their raw theatrics, struck a nerve. British fashion, bold and unapologetic, felt like a secret world where people were free to be themselves.
But in Palestine, that kind of freedom felt distant. The pressure to choose a “serious” career was heavy, and Ayham buried his dream of fashion beneath expectations, even trying to follow safer paths and pursuing eCommerce for a bit.
But it was illness that changed everything. Kidney failure and a near-death experience were an epiphany that he could no longer ignore what he wanted. “I realized I didn’t have to follow what society expected of me,” he says. “Pursuing art was the most rewarding decision I made.”
First Creations: The Search for Redemption
His first creations were sketches of Bella Hadid and Zendaya, but they soon gave way to something deeper when, in his first year at university, he developed a project titled “Path for Salvation.”
Inspired by Mad Max, the project asked what salvation means in a place where even access to water is controlled. The project paralleled his lived experience: just as access to water was controlled in the dystopian film, the Israeli army controlled access to food and aid in Palestine.
He used nails from his uncle’s bombed building to rust the fabric, embedding trauma directly into the material. “It was about how you try to reach salvation through ruggedness, but you never reach it,” he explains.
That was the moment Ayham understood that fashion could capture emotions that words couldn’t.
Designing Under Occupation: When Even Scissors Become Forbidden
In Ramallah, design was as much about limitations as creation. There was no fashion scene, no designers to look up to. Shops carried only basic fabrics. Traditional embroidery was disappearing from everyday life.
“Even carrying scissors across cities wasn’t allowed,” Ayham recalls. That small detail says everything—when occupation governs even the movement of trivial tools, every step in the creative process becomes a form of resistance.
The fragmentation of Palestine weighed on him too. He had never set foot in Gaza, never seen its craft traditions with his own eyes. Entire cities were cut off from him. “It’s like everything is aligned for you to fail,” he says.
Yet those very restrictions sharpened his vision. He became obsessed with archiving what was vanishing, with preserving traditions and transforming them into something alive. Out of constraint came resilience.
London: Freedom and the Weight of Diaspora
Being a student at Central Saint Martins in London offered Ayham something Palestine never could: access. Museums, ateliers, archives—the heart of global fashion. Yet freedom came with its own weight. “Suddenly, I was the only one who spoke Arabic, the only Muslim in the room.” Racism, homesickness, and diaspora became familiar.
Even leaving Palestine had been an ordeal: a rejected visa, a detour through Jordan, uncertainty at every step. That journey inspired his first London project, titled “Palestine Across Borders,” about the borderlines that slice lives apart.
And though he stood in the center of fashion, Palestine never left him. “My encounter with occupation didn’t end, even when I left,” he says. “Palestine is always an extension of me.”
Preserving Textiles and Stories Destroyed by Genocide
When the genocide in Gaza began, Ayham was interning at Givenchy. Outside, Paris shimmered with Met Gala glamour, while at home, his people faced devastation. “I felt paralyzed creatively,” he admits. “What am I missing? What don’t I know?”
He turned to Gaza’s textile traditions: Majdalawi weaving, embroidery, thobes. Every dress, he discovered, held a story—not just of fashion, but of survival. Families clung to garments as archives of their ancestors. Mothers ululated in grief, yet still insisted on dignity. Even in war, Palestinians were cooking, dressing, weaving. Life was holding on.
Ayham understood his responsibility. In one of the world’s top fashion universities, he had the chance to document, archive, and amplify what others couldn’t. “War doesn’t just kill people. It kills history, dreams, hopes,” he says. He decided to keep them alive through fashion.
Fashion as Resistance, Fashion as Memory
Ayham Hassan’s story is weaving the threads of Palestine into everything he creates. His work has always been about transforming lived reality into something tangible. His collection, Immortal Magenta, doesn’t shy away from grief or survival, but it also refuses to let Palestinian life be defined only by pain. Through ancestral techniques, the hands of Palestinian artisans, and a color that technically doesn’t exist, Ayham carries forward stories that might otherwise be erased.
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