Dima Ayad

Dima Ayad founded her label in Dubai in 2010, and the Lebanese designer has built it around a premise still rare among considered MENA brands: that occasionwear should be cut for women of every size, here running 0 to 22. The clothes lean glamorous and lightly modest, sequinned dresses, soft-pleated separates, knitted metallic kaftans, polka-dot cocoon shapes that drape rather than cling. Ayad describes herself as obsessed with the metallic, and the collections bear it out, though the discipline is in the fit work that makes a single garment read the same across a wide size run. What earns Dima Ayad a place here is that the inclusivity is structural, not a marketing line appended to a standard size grid.