The Founder

Imagine a wide-eyed and wonder-filled girl exploring the familiar tunnels of Al-Quds (Jerusalem’s) old city as if for the first time, from her father’s souvenir shop through the many shops, kiosks, stands, and corners of the market, following the cadence of bejeweled headdresses, skirts, and wrists punctuated by the clockwork clanging of iron shop doors opening and moaning their call to the morning’s patrons. She dances forth weightlessly, under and between the kaleidoscopic array of hand-crafted and painted ceramics, embroidered garments hanging just out of reach of a child’s arms, and antique silver jewelry, contrasted and framed on all sides by the intimately familiar pale grays, beige, and creams of a stone so native as to be termed “Jerusalem stone.”

Imagine many years later that same impressionable and absorbent mind encountering modern shapes, colors, and styles and reconciling both past and present artifacts and archetypes in a single shared narrative through clothing, resulting in a simultaneously historical and contemporary wearable narrative like ancient tapestries with a modern make-over.

Noora Khalifeh does not see a market in the Old City; instead, she sees a runway. The exotic, local and foreign, each body an unwitting character in her show from the local merchants and artisans in the traditional regional garb of Palestine to the foreign visitors with their unique cultural contributions: all of the garments come from a place and represent political, cultural, social, as well as spiritual realities, but at the same time, they populate the stage and, in doing so, become unquestionably Jerusalemite. Jerusalem is an inescapably international world capital, and the western, modern influences blend with and become part of the tapestry. All of these archetypes have analogs in the fashion world, and the interplay of these symbols—the masculine, authoritarian, the gentle maternal, the pastoral—serve as the secondary influences on Noora’s designs, preceded only by traditional Palestinian cross-stitch. This is Noora’s Old City.

Through her pieces, designer Noora Khalifeh aims to share with us these sensations, and with these sensations, her impressions of the world she inhabits, her interpretations of the interaction of history with the present, the uniquely Palestinian, and specifically feminine experience that always was a story told in stitches, but lacked the language to be carried beyond its sphere.