What It’s Like to Be a Fashion Designer in the West Bank

Yasmeen Mjalli doesn’t recognize the hills in the occupied West Bank anymore. Their red soil and the trees that once stood on their crests have been replaced with the white trailers of new illegal settlements. Sometimes, she racks her brain: “What did that look like last year? Why did I not take a video?”

But Mjalli, 28, doesn’t have much time to dwell on it. She has about 40 artisans — tailors, weavers, and embroiderers — who rely on her and her clothing line, Nöl Collective, for a steady income stream. Since the siege on Gaza began last October, Palestinians in the West Bank have been denied entry to work in Israel, subsequently freezing about 80,000 work permits and leading to a ripple effect of financial strife. As a result, women in the West Bank have turned to skills like embroidery to support their families. “Our production coordinator, her phone is constantly going off with new people contacting her asking about work. We’re still not at a level where we can accommodate everyone, but that’s why we started trying to incorporate even more embroidery,” Mjalli says. “We need to support these women.”

Born in the United States to Palestinian immigrant parents, Mjalli moved back to the West Bank to reunite with her family after graduating from college in North Carolina and has been building Nöl Collective out of Ramallah since 2017. Mjalli incorporates indigenous practices into her work, such as hand-dying fabric with natural dyes made from local plants, insects, and roots; utilizing traditional methods of weaving; and employing a network of locals to hand-embroider much of the clothing, creating a unique blend of modern and traditional Palestinian line work, or tatreez. “It’s our duty to help preserve those crafts and tell their stories,” she says.

And while she spends much of her day as any other designer might — checking in with vendors, keeping track of shipments — sometimes, the stakes are higher, as when she took it upon herself to help two of her weavers in Gaza, brothers Husam and Waleed, to evacuate. The brothers are some of the last people practicing traditional Majdalawi weaving, a discipline nearly wiped out after Al-Majdal, the village of its origin, was destroyed decades ago. This fabric, used in thobes, or traditional Palestinian dresses, from the Gaza region and surrounding villages is customarily purple, a shade made from the crushed seashells of the area’s local beaches and turquoise made from indigo. Even prior to the war, the practice was already on the verge of extinction.

At the time, the cost of evacuation was around $10,000 a person. Mjalli’s campaign raised over $100,000, and by jumping over numerous hurdles, like arranging for someone in Egypt to wait in line for two days to register the brothers for evacuation, Husam, along with his wife, their children, and two of Waleed’s children, escaped. The journey was treacherous, Mjalli relays to me, noting that Husam had to decide whether to drive down a desolate, heavily bombed road and risk getting killed or miss their evacuation appointment. When Husam and his family crossed the border into Egypt, he asked their driver to stop at a convenience store. “The kids all got out, and they ran around going crazy for chocolate chips and things they hadn’t seen in months,” Mjalli said. Waleed, though, who suffers from kidney failure and needs dialysis, stayed behind in the hope of being granted a medical evacuation. The Rafah border, the gateway between Egypt and Gaza, has since been bombed and shut down by the Israeli military, and Waleed remains in the strip.

Over the course of several months, I checked in with Mjalli to get a better understanding of what it’s like to run a fashion business out of the occupied West Bank.

What does it feel like to be living in the West Bank right now? 

Well, it’s very different now versus the past few years. Right now, it feels dystopian. It feels maddening. It makes me feel nauseous. I live in Ramallah, but my family is from Tubas, which, in normal times, can take us like an hour and a half to get there by car. Now, it takes two to three hours because of checkpoints that have been erected by the Israeli military. You have to go past Nablus and all these places you’ve seen in the news with upticks in settler violence. It’s happening so fast. The hills are being eaten alive by more and more settlement construction. And that’s all in the past few months.

You start to go mad because you’re driving on a road you’ve been driving on your entire life and one day you look over and there’s a hill you’ve seen like 1,000 times and suddenly there’s construction at the top of it. You look at it and then you can’t remember what it looked like before. There’s a sense of urgency to document it. A sense of constant panic. I feel like I’m running out of time.

Have you felt afraid in the past few months since the assault on Gaza started and the assault on the West Bank has been intensifying?

The past couple of years have been really bad. And I have been afraid and enraged. I’ve had a gun in my face. It’s such an indescribable feeling. It feels like the whole world, all the sound, just escapes. Everything disappears and all you can picture is it going off. And that happens pretty regularly when you’re at a checkpoint. It’s an everyday thing, but it never stops being terrifying.

How long does it typically take you to go through one of these checkpoints?

The entire country is bottlenecked into Awarta, a tiny checkpoint, and it can take three hours sometimes, if not more.

The women I work with in Al-Khalil do a specific style of weaving. It’s so gorgeous. In normal circumstances, it takes three hours to reach them if you could go straight from Ramallah through Jerusalem. But you have to go around Jerusalem, around the apartheid wall. It takes five or six hours.

And because our family lives up north, if we want to see our family, we’re going to have to go through a checkpoint pretty frequently. People are separated. What used to take ten minutes to meet them now will take two, three hours. But we know on the other side we get to sit with our family. My uncles and cousins and aunts, we’ll stay up all night for hours drinking coffee and having sweets and telling stories. That, for me, is the whole world. Even with the community we work with, if we bear the drive of going to meet the weavers, we know we’re in for an incredible day of laughter and stories and food.

These kids living next to the checkpoint, they like to sell coffee and tea in big thermoses their moms will make. It’s an opportunity for them to support themselves. Sometimes, people get out of the cars if traffic’s really not moving and they’ll chat. We make the best of it.

When did you know you wanted to be a designer?

I had this jacket I had painted and then I posted a photo in it and this girl that I know DM’d me and she was like, “I want that jacket. Can you make one for me?” And eventually, I was getting so many requests from people to make this jacket, so I was like, I’m gonna do jackets for a cause. So I started painting these jackets and would host workshops for people to come together and talk about their traumas and find community and support, and the money from the jackets would go to these women’s organizations and it kind of just kept growing from there. Then, around the pandemic, I thought, Instead of donating to women’s orgs, why don’t we work with women who can start making their own money and highlight their skills? Nöl was born to be a very conscious, intersectional kind of thing.

Now that you’ve changed your practices, which people do you work with?

It’s a big net. We worked with weavers in Gaza, of course. We work with weavers in the south of Al-Khalil and embroiderers all over — in Ramallah, in Nablus, in tiny villages all around these bigger places. Our tailors are in Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, Ramallah, and the Askar refugee camp.

How do you find these artisans?

It’s a lot of work. What we do is either use word of mouth or go into Facebook groups.

We’ve expanded to working with around 30 to 40 women. Their families are now relying on you for income because their husbands and sons and fathers lost their jobs in ’48 after the war started because Palestinians working in construction in ’48 got kicked out after October 7. That’s why we started trying to incorporate even more embroidery — to maximize the pay these women are getting.

How does it feel for you as somebody who lives in the West Bank to see these things happening that are technically illegal but no one’s actually doing anything?

It’s enraging. It’s dystopian. I called a weaver near Al-Khalil to check in, and she was so upset. Nothing was going in because the Israeli military had closed off the village. Food was limited. It was scarce. It’s heartbreaking.

There are three brothers we work with in a refugee camp near Nablus; they’re tailors there. One of their nephews got shot and killed by Israeli soldiers who were in their camp. It happens, but we don’t talk about the trauma of the people we work with out of respect for them because we don’t want to commercialize their trauma. It’s just part of our life.

During Fashion Weeks and at events, few designers acknowledged or spoke about what is going on in Palestine. How does that make you feel?

If you’re not even going to acknowledge what is happening in Gaza, you should at least acknowledge that what you’re doing is inherently political. Someone made your fabric. Someone in some country had to grow the cotton and then weave it to make the fabric. You’re talking about labor practices. You’re talking about the environment. Fashion is inherently political. Every single person who creates fashion is involved in a political framework.

How do you continue to do the work and create under militarism and the stress and grief and trauma surrounding you?

If I didn’t have the work, I would have gone even more insane because every single person I work with, I love. I have a deep, deep sense of kinship. They’re my brothers and my sisters and my uncles and my aunties. When the war broke out, people did not move, no one left the house, the whole city was shut down, people were terrified, and no one knew what was going on. The place I went to was the fabric store. That was my place of solace. I would go to the fabric store, and I would talk to the staff there.

And when the war started, the rates of poverty in Palestine skyrocketed. At one point, we were the only ones who were placing orders in the workshops, and we were keeping a little stream of income coming in there. It’s gratifying to see women, especially women, who are making money during this time. It’s gratifying to see their excitement, their first paycheck.

How does it feel to keep parts of your community going? 

I feel fucking proud.

Do you run into any issues shipping in or out of the West Bank?

First of all, you can’t put a Palestinian number on a package because the chances it would be rejected increase. So you have to know someone’s Israeli number. Out of nowhere, over a year ago, Israel decided, No, you’re not allowed anymore to directly deliver packages into the West Bank. So we would get a package and they would call us and say you have to come in person and pick it up physically, but we have green IDs, so we can’t go. So at one point, I would ship things to people who were abroad, and if they were coming back, they would bring it with them. We tried importing fabric for coats and jackets for our fall collection, and it never arrived. This season is the time brands are making like 25 percent of their revenue for the entire year, and I’m somewhat worried. But getting fabric here in Palestine is hard. Anything that’s being imported into Palestine gets held for security screening by Israel for months.

There’s this olive-green fabric we wanted to make jerseys with. When you import it in big quantities, it gets held at security screening to make sure that it’s not being used for “military purposes” and that resistance fighters aren’t going to use it to make uniforms. So the factory we work with had to provide endless documents to Israel to prove they weren’t using it for anything like that, and customs harassed them for a couple of months and would not release this shipment. When it finally was released, the factory we worked with wasn’t willing to go through all of that again.

Recently, we’ve also had packages arrive to customers with items missing or the whole package just empty because someone in Israeli customs opens it, sees it’s made in Palestine, and just destroys it and then ships an empty package. Not to mention how expensive it is. The cost of shipping has skyrocketed. Obviously, with the war, importing has doubled and tripled in cost.

What dreams do you have for yourself and Nöl Collective?

I want to see the apartheid wall taken down. I want to be part of that. I want to find more artisans and pull them into the network.

I want to keep supporting different crafts and highlight them, helping preserve them, because some of the people who do these crafts are so old. I feel really proud of our work and bringing attention to Majdalawi fabric. I just want to keep supporting people financially and providing income for them. I want to show Palestine’s rich heritage of crafts beyond embroidery. People think of Palestine and they think of embroidery, but we really do have so much more, and it’s our duty to help preserve those crafts and tell their stories.