ISLAM NASHEF
SCHOOL
INSTAGRAM PROFILE
ABOUT ISLAM :
Islam Nashef is an artist and designer-maker from Taybeh, in occupied Palestine, where personal and political realities are inseparable from daily life. Currently completing his studies in fashion and jewelry design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, with a particular focus on shoemaking, Nashef does not define himself as a traditional fashion designer. Instead, he sees his work as art produced through fashion — a practice in which materials, form, and experimentation serve as tools for existential reflection and self-expression.
Living under occupation, his experience is embedded in his designs: movement restricted, language politicized, and even the simplest relationships with objects charged with meaning. Fashion, for Nashef, becomes a visual language that both archives emotion and challenges invisibility. Within a Palestinian art scene where fashion is rarely recognized as a contemporary medium, he proposes it as a form of testimony — capable of carrying political narratives, personal histories, and aesthetic visions.
His graduate collection, Shields, crystallizes these ideas through the metaphor of armor. The collection investigates the tension between the ego’s instinct to protect, control, and impress, and the fragile human yearning for tenderness, vulnerability, and love. Leather, chosen for its strength and adaptability, becomes both a literal and symbolic second skin. Structured silhouettes evoke the presence of a modern warrior, while looser, more fluid forms open space for softness and release. Techniques such as rope reliefs, laminations, and zigzag stitching embody processes of binding and stabilizing, reflecting the delicate balance between resilience and fragility. The monochrome palette of black and white mirrors the interplay of opposing inner forces — confidence and doubt, resistance and surrender.
Through Shields, Nashef imagines garments not as decorative commodities but as shields, stages, and extensions of the self. Each piece embodies the duality of armor and openness, projecting strength even in moments of uncertainty. It is a collection that redefines fashion as both art and resistance: a space where the personal and political merge, where vulnerability is reclaimed as power, and where clothing becomes an active language of presence and survival.
