This Jordanian Designer’s Pieces Have Been Acquired By The V&A Museum
Nafsika Skourti explores identity and origin using symbols rooted in her multicultural heritage
Jordan-born Nafsika Skourti’s designs are, put simply, uber-cool. A graduate of Central Saint Martins and of Ecole Lesage haute couture embroidery school, she heads her eponymous label from Amman and can list some of today’s cultural icons as admirers of her designs.
It’s really no surprise that her pieces would be found in a museum, since her eye-catching work provides an intersection between fashion design and art. She has an avant-garde aesthetic, which perennially pushes the boundaries of traditional tailoring. She uses Western silhouettes like denim jackets, whilst channelling Amman’s ‘90s-style, high-octane glitz and glamour, married with a chic brand of minimalism.
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‘The Antiquity story’ series is part of Skourti’s autumn/winter 2018 collection, ‘The Lowest Point on Earth’, and features a selection of jeans and matching jackets, emblazoned with images of world-famous landmarks that are a nod to Skourti’s own Jordanian-Greek-Palestinian identity: Petra, the Parthenon and The Dome of the Rock. The latter design caught the attention of London’s renowned Victoria & Albert Museum, where the piece now lives as part of the museum’s collection of over 19,000 items from the Middle East and North Africa.
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She employs an eclectic combination of different fabrics and denim tones in creating the two-piece ensembles. Finished with distressing and a sheepskin collar, the garments fit right in with London street style, whilst laying bare her personal narrative and quite literally depicting the current landscape of her region.
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Her pieces embody her heritage through the lens of her European education and European portion of her identity. She does this by playing on the stereotypes of her countries of origin – Petra and the Parthenon often being the cultural sites glorified by tourists and the sole basis of foreigners’ impressions of the nations.
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