Dr Laila Al-Bassam on Preserving Saudi Fashion
With the debut of her book, the first in a series dedicated to documenting the sartorial evolution of KSA, the teacher of fashion history and traditional textiles at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University is passionately dedicated to preserving the evolution of Saudi dress
How people dress over generations is one crucial way a nation expresses its evolution and transformation. This visual storytelling, with pieces often passed down through families, helps a society to better understand where it has come from and also inspires its future. Dr Laila Al-Bassam, who teaches fashion history and traditional textiles at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, has made it her life’s work to safeguard for posterity the vestimentary transformation that is taking place in the Kingdom.
In her new book Traditional Saudi Fashion in Najd, which she created in collaboration with the Saudi photographer Abdullah Al Mushrif, Dr Laila comprehensively documents the fertile cultural heritage in the central region of Saudi Arabia, highlighting its traditional costumes and particular style of dress.
She sourced much of the information presented in the book from a dissertation she first presented 35 years ago, painstakingly reworking her original paper for this book so that it would be more easily digestible for a larger audience to enjoy. The book is also just the first in what will become a series of tomes, each one dedicated to traditional fashion from a different region of the Kingdom.
To celebrate the launch of the book, a special event was held at the Murabba Palace in Riyadh under the patronage of HRH Princess Sara bint Mashour Al Saud, wife of HRH Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, and was attended by some of the most prominent female leaders of the Kingdom.
At the launch, Dr Laila stressed the importance of preserving traditional costumes and commemorating the region’s fashion. She pointed to the success of Saudi National Day, which has quickly become linked to the promotion and wearing of national costumes, as a very hopeful development. The holiday has opened people’s eyes to many different aspects of Saudi fashion. Moreover, she praised the efforts of Saudi’s current fashion designers to find inspiration from traditional attire and how they have used that knowledge to create sophisticated and modern designs that also give a respectful nod to the past.
This book series project, which is under the patronage of the King Abdulaziz Foundation, is part of a broader preservation effort to document different aspects of Saudi’s heritage and history. The hope is that in the future this book, and those that follow, will serve as a curriculum for history and fashion classes and a source for research on traditional Saudi fashion, thus providing insight into the lives of both the nation’s ancestors and its contemporaries from the unique perspective of fashion.
For more information, please visit darahstore.com.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s January 2024 issue.