Paris Couture Week Dinner Spotlights Qatari Designer Yasmin Mansour

PARIS — Qatar is ready to bring its fashion designers to the world stage.

Paris-based designers including Giambattista Valli, Gaia Repossi and Burç Akyol turned out for a dinner on the closing day of Paris Couture Week in honor of Yasmin Mansour, one of the country’s rising talents.

The event was hosted by M7, the innovation and entrepreneurship hub for design, fashion and tech established by Qatar Museums under the leadership of Her Excellency Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, the sister of Qatar’s ruler.

The winner of the most recent edition of the Fashion Trust Arabia Prize in the eveningwear category, Mansour presented a selection of her designs, showcasing her signature fabric layering technique, in a vast apartment on Rue de Rivoli.

But the clothes were best appreciated on stylish guests like Farida Khelfa, who wore an ivory tailored coat with mille-feuille sleeves, and Natalia Vodianova, in a short bustier dress with a layered skirt, accessorized with one of Mansour’s croissant-shaped handbags — which also inspired the menu by culinary collective We Are Ona.  

“I think she’s very talented, and I’ve been attending Fashion Trust Arabia, where Yasmin, like other nominees and winners, get highlighted. I’m just very curious to support other regions, other talents, other points of view,” Vodianova said. 

The model, philanthropist and entrepreneur noted that the Middle East was becoming a huge market for luxury goods.

“Therefore, also, there is a lot of exposure to beauty, but within a very unique cultural setting which creates something new and fresh and exciting for the rest of the world,” she said.

So what could she fit in such a tiny purse? “My bag is very small, but it’s quite magic,” she said, pulling out a credit card, pouch, lipgloss and Samsung Galaxy flip phone to demonstrate. 

Mansour said she soft-launched the bags two years ago, starting with family and friends and gradually expanding preorders to the rest of the Gulf region. She plans to relaunch her website next month to make them widely available for sale for the first time.

Customers will also be able to preorder her fall collection, set to go on sale at Harrods department store in London in June, she said. 

Mansour’s designs are strongly inspired by architecture, with her latest collection taking its cues from the National Museum of Qatar designed by Jean Nouvel, who based its petal-shaped structure on a desert rose mineral formation. 

Aldana Al Mesnad, head of business development at M7, said the nonprofit works in partnership with Scale7, a fashion and design business incubator founded by Qatar Development Bank, to help promote, develop and foster the creative industry in the country.

“What we focus more on is really pushing the designers to think more creatively and on a bigger scale,” she explained. “We’re really trying to get them to think of the global market and how they can enter it, and we give them the tools.”

The country has ambitions to create a local school for craftsmanship, but it is building its local fashion industry one step at a time to ensure the structures are sustainable, the executive said. 

“Nowhere in the world will you find that you have a small pool of talent that can have access to world class resources,” Al Mesnad remarked.

“I see this as one of our good traits, because now we can really build on a small scale, think long term, not really try to do a huge splash or, ‘I want 100 or 200 designers to make it.’ I’m looking at three, then four, then five,” she added. 

Mansour got emotional when discussing the journey of her brand, established in 2014.

“I feel like I’m part of inspiring the new generations. And I always have tears in my eyes when I talk about this, because we don’t have it now, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to just show people what Qatar can do, also in fashion,” she said.