‘Not your habibti’: Palestinian designer seeks to empower women
ramallah — It’s only three words on a T-shirt or embroidered on a denim jacket in Palestinian designer Yasmeen Mjalli’s collection, but they carry a powerful message: “Not your habibti”, or darling.
She sees the clothes as helping empower Palestinian women facing unwelcome male attention in public.
“When a woman is exposed to so much harassment on the street, she begins to dress to protect herself, to hide herself as opposed to expressing herself,” the 22-year-old art history graduate says, leaning against the counter of her shop in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
On fabrics of muted colours and on canvas bags from her BabyFist label, she places messages in English and Arabic inside drawings of flowers and other designs. “Every rose has its revolution,” one says.
Mjalli grew up in the United States, where she lived with her Palestinian parents.
She started painting slogans on her own clothes when the family relocated to the West Bank and she found herself facing a different reality. “I have experienced things like comments, really uncomfortable stares, the kind that make you feel very violated,” she said.
“I have been assaulted in the streets, people touching me,” she adds, catching one tattooed arm in her other hand to mimic being grabbed.
In August 2017, she launched her first collection and a few months later opened the Ramallah shop to complement her existing online sales. “It’s not like the T-shirt is going to stop harassment,” she says.
When a woman is exposed to so much harassment on the street, she begins to dress to protect herself, to hide herself as opposed to expressing herself
Yasmeen Mjalli, designer
But it’s “a reminder that you are part of something bigger that is working to empower women and to give back in some way and that is trying to have this conversation that challenges all of these structures which we are victims of too”, she adds.
The goal, Mjalli says, is to create a community.
Using Instagram, free workshops in her shop and public places where she sometimes installs herself with a typewriter, she offers Palestinian women the freedom to express their feelings and tell stories they cannot share elsewhere.
She donates around 10 per cent of her fashion earnings to a local women’s group.
One project she funds sent a doctor and volunteers into schools to teach Palestinian girls about menstruation, a subject still largely taboo.
While defining herself as a feminist, Mjalli says that her fight against harassment of women is unconnected to the #MeToo movement.
“I don’t think it’s related even though it happened at the same time,” she said, though acknowledging that the movement gave her own efforts a boost. —