How does fashion influence culture and people's perceptions of their own bodies and narratives? How does viewing our own cultures through an orientalist lens influence the stories we tell? In the premiere episode of our podcast, we're joined by Imad Gebrayel, an expert ready to shed light on these intricate issues.
Imad Gebrayel is a Lebanese designer, lecturer, and researcher based in Berlin. He specialized in identity representation and bilingual visual communication and produced visual and theoretical works around self-Orientalism in Arab* design, counter-mapping, and archiving. Imad also collaborated with several journalistic platforms on exploring common grounds between design and media outlets across Europe.
"Before colonialism, we were multiple genders, we were not the binaries we know now. We were always about complexity and always about difference, and I think we need to go back to that idea if we want to do any self-expression or self-representation work, whether in fashion or not. We have to rethink simplification as a mandate."
- Imad Gebrayel
With several years of experience as creative director of Mojo Ink, operating between Abu Dhabi and Beirut, Imad moved to the Netherlands, where he received a Master’s degree in Design, then moved to Berlin, where he co-founded various projects centering Arab-migrant experiences. Imad is currently teaching at several academic institutions and undertaking ethnographic research on the negotiations of Arab-Muslim identifications in Sonnenallee-Berlin, as part of his PhD project at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
"Fashion is a very vital part of the culture - it feeds from it and shapes it at the same time. As a system, fashion has the power to not only tell people what to do with their bodies but also take away their stories, meaning, and context."
- Beata Wilczek
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud, or watch on YouTube.
Host: Beata Wilczek
Guest: Imad Gebrayel
Music: SKY H1
Production: Julia Kąkolewska
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