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    Reemami’s “As I Remember It”: A Collection Built From Memory

    Created over a year and a half, "As I Remember It" is the most expansive collection Reemami has made so far. It has 65 looks, and instead of starting from one reference, it grew from an accumulation of fragments: childhood and teenage memories, family photographs, old clothes, toys, archival images, traditional dress and visual references from the region. At its core is the instinct to look at the familiar differently.

    The collection unfolds across five chapters. It begins with The Memory Box, which opens onto childhood. It includes the unusual visual world of growing up as a dentist’s child, where toothbrushes and clinical imagery became everyday references. These resurface in pieces like the Tooth Brush Pants, which feature a manipulated childhood photograph, and the Toothpaste Waterfall Dress. Corduroy, organza, denim and deadstock fabrics are layered and pieced together with an instinctive, imperfect touch. Standouts include the Red Anemone Cardigan, with sculpted three-dimensional flowers inspired by the anemones that grow wild across Palestine, and the Wildflower Organza Dress.

    Through the Blinds plays with what is seen and what is hidden. Light and shadow become diagonals, bands and pinstripes, and tatreez references are stretched into new graphic forms, with sheer layers and lace interrupting one another. In the Between the Blinds pieces, a deep V-shaped hem and mid-calf lines echo that sense of catching only fragments of what lies beyond.

    Crossed Paths brings Palestinian and Bedouin references together with Reemami’s own language of tailoring, drape and exaggerated proportion. Bedouin checks, drawn from archival images of dress, become new compositions. The agal and its rope are taken apart and rebuilt through insertions and sculptural construction, as in the denim Eiqal Sculptual Pants, whose rope-edged panels hold the fabric away from the body. Chapters four and five are still to be revealed.

    Tatreez runs through the whole collection. Traditional symbols are pulled, enlarged and abstracted into prints, and their geometry is pushed into unexpected territory, including a zebra-like interpretation. The aim is not to copy traditional embroidery, but to take its visual language apart and see what it can become. Reemami’s existing techniques are pushed further too: pleats are inverted, familiar shapes are distorted, and checks meet prints.

    It is also the label’s most technically ambitious work, yet it stays playful. The serious sits beside the silly, heritage meets childhood games, and complex construction meets humour. Heritage here is not preserved behind glass but treated as something alive, to be questioned, reinterpreted and brought into the present.

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