Firas Zedan Unveils Zwara

A roster of 7 looks unveils the masterful vision of Zedan in his thesis collection titled, ‘Zwara.’ What’s more, the designer goes above and beyond with each look, injecting motifs from his past life and fusing it with elements from now. This ultramodern twist is bolstered by his sharp precision and ability to take ordinary silhouettes and manipulate them to highlight his narration skills. With a color palette that consists mostly of black and white, the pops of neutral-colored hues assist his vision. Each look fuses harmoniously together, offering the viewer insight into what goes on in the mind of Zedan.

office sat down with the up-and-coming designer to discuss his body of work, source of inspiration, and future designs. 

What are you feeling the most excited about right now?

I think I've finally fallen in love with fashion. I know that with a lot of people when you're pursuing the dream of fashion and design, I guess people expect it to be something like, ‘I wanted to do this all my life and all that.’ Though for me it's always been about fine art, which is what I've always been passionate about. It wasn't until I finished those collections that I realized that I wanna do fashion design. Even though I've done my internships and I've done all these jobs, I didn't realize how much I loved it as a medium until I finished it two weeks ago. I finished my collection, I had the shoot and the presentations and whatnot and then I found myself thinking about what the hell I'm gonna do next. I ended up watching an absurd amount of documentaries on different designers and whatnot and I'm mostly just re-educating myself on fashion. So yeah, for me it's just finally being excited about what I want to do and having time to do it now. There are a million different things I could do and I just have to pick something and start.

What are some of the core elements for you as a designer? Why are these elements important for you to explore?

I think for me, a lot of why I fell in love with fashion is not because I love, 一 I mean, I do love these things, but it's not the reason why 一 but the elegance, the minimalism, and the luxury aspect of it, it's very glitz and glam. Though the way that I started appreciating fashion was because of the drama and the unexpected elements. I've always loved horror. I've grown up obsessed with horror movies and I want to be a director at some point. So I also love the idea of this anticipation in a horror movie where you're kind of at the edge of the seat, but you can't stop staring. This is something I wanna get more into and combine the same elements that horror does. I still like beauty so whether that be quite literal and dramatic or more in the details in terms of how something is made, and not extremely leaning into this luxury market, but more having this existential idea behind it.

So anti-perfection in a way, I feel like that's how I've always done things and I've always been hard on my designing skills until I started to appreciate that I'm not the best seamstress in the world, but that's not what I'm here to do. I bring stories to life instead of making perfect garments. I think beauty and horror are really important. I'm very inspired by posthumanism and the element of the future. I think especially with Arab designers and Palestinians, we're pushed down the route of doing extreme luxury. Which can be beautiful, but I feel like there's such a small amount of artists and designers coming from there right now that are more provocative and more future thinking.

Your thesis collection is incredible. How did you conceptualize your vision for this roster of looks and how did you go about breathing life into each piece?

So my thesis is titled ‘Zwara,’ which means family gathering. I wanted to explore my history and bring inspiration from my culture in a more contemporary way. There are amazing designers around the world who combine elements of the Arab world and Arab design, but I wanted to do it subtly. So more avant-garde and abstract rather than taking motifs from things that are relevant to my culture of putting it in. Essentially it was a way for me to connect with my culture again, especially in the last year of my time at Parsons. Going out into the world, I think with a lot of immigrants, there's a fear of losing touch with your culture and then, being whitewashed and not having those things that you grew up with that make you feel at home.

So within that, I wanted to take those little things. For example, the dog was actually like a childhood toy of mine that I gifted to my sister, and then when I moved here, she gave it to me. It's just kind of taking these small little motifs that remind me of home that might not be so literal. When I look at my collection, I see all these bits and pieces from my home and that's how I was designing the pieces. I was thinking of how, how does this fit into this world that I'm building? Because that's essentially what I want to do, I wanna build something that exists within my universe rather than existing in the current world. So it's just like, how does this fit into the narrative? How does this remind me of home and how does this relate to either me or the more general public? How can someone look at this and relate to it in a different way than how I would relate to it?

What other elements of inspiration do you sort of like to draw from other things? You live in New York where there's like a constant source of inspiration, so like what are you looking to when you're trying to find inspiration for something?

My inspiration comes from film. It also comes from what's happening in the world and draws inspiration from more primary sources. Being original is so difficult right now, especially with how everything is digitalized. I don't know how possible it is to be original at this point because there's so much of everything we're so oversaturated. So I find inspiration more through my initial research, which is more literary-based, like reading up. When I started this project, I was reading up a lot on posthumanism, diaspora art, and different fine artists' approaches to making art rather than fashion designers. That's just kind of been my approach to creating.

Recently I’ve been indulging in the idea of fashion design and understanding different designers. I've always had a good understanding of it, but never fully indulged in it. So now I've been having more of an appreciation for the simpler things in fashion rather than the way that I used to think. For example, I think about Raf Simons first collection of shirts and workwear, one of the first things he's ever made. It was so simple, but when you look at it now, especially from someone who's not within fashion, it's just thinking about how to take something so basic and redesign it in a way that makes you stand up. That's kind of how he built his career off of that line, which is bizarre.

The phrase in your lookbook reads, ‘A world existing between my current and younger self.’ Could you dive deeper into that and explain what that means?

In a way, it's like taking things from my past, but it's not a collection that exists in the past. It's also taking things from my current experience, such as the metal details on certain pieces, which contrasts our cultural standards of how we should exist in the world, especially in the middle east. So it's just taking things from the past from me now and thinking about things that I think about in the future and creating this middle ground universe that kind of has this build-up of everything. I think of that space existing as my body of work for the future as well. Everything I want to do in the future, I want to fit into this world. So it's all about world-building for me and this is only a very small step into that because after finishing this collection, I feel like it’s almost 10% of what I now feel like the next collection could be.

From what I’ve seen in the past few years, a lot of thesis collections stick to very basic designs. However, you went out of the park and created all of these bizarre silhouettes, do you naturally gravitate towards designs like these?

Well, I was like, ‘why do I want to confine myself to making a collection that is very wearable or sellable.’ If I'm still a student there is no expectation for me to create something that fits into a market. There's such an emphasis in a lot of fashion schools, like, who is your customer, etc, which is very valid, 一 the professional world 一 but just thinking of myself as a student and this catharsis of pent up creativity that I haven't been able to do anything about. I just wanted to challenge myself to kind of keep playing around with things that I've never worked with before. I didn’t wanna do anything that would be considered basic in a way, I wanted it to be abnormal.

It was a projection of a fantasy where I imagine a world where this is what people look like. I think, especially fashion designers, seeing how almost disposable we are in the pandemic and how fast our market just kind of disappears, and how commercial, places like New York are right now. It's just so repetitive and I just felt wrong to keep feeding into that kind of cycle of making clothes that will sell. So I just definitely wanted to push that and then from that, I can develop iterations that are more wearable and whatnot. But because I'm creating more, I was thinking about it more as specific art pieces and how they would kind of exist in more of exhibition space and interact with each other.

Where do you hope to take your designs in, in your future? And like, what can you tell us about any upcoming collections if that's even on your mind right now?

I think the next thing for me is just honing in on my craft learning, how to tailor more accurately, and refining my sewing skills so I can produce the more high-end concepts that rely less on drama and more on precision. I'm in a transitional period right now, so I'm figuring out whether I wanna stay in New York or go to London and go to CSM. Everything's up in the air, but I'm hoping that whether I stay or go over there, I'll start setting up my studio so I can start producing more stuff and working more independently. That's my goal at some point, like a lot of other designers, is to become a creative director. I wanna run my own brand and be able to tell stories that I feel are not told and think about how to structure that brand more sustainably. I’m also interested in jumping around different brands and designing and seeing how that informs my aesthetic.

I think it's such a big thing working in fashion, I mean, I only know working in New York, but in every brand, I've worked for I'm the only Arab there, especially Palestinian, there's such an emphasis on diversity in fashion. But more on the surface level, not when you go into their actual offices and their design studios and you see who actually works and it's so far away from being diverse. That's just the reality of the industry that people, I guess still refuse to accept, but yeah, so definitely wanting to, with my brand, be able to create a space, that's more inclusive like that. I want to grant the opportunity for people from whatever background to be able to create and experiment with what fashion could be rather than what it is now.