When British-Palestinian designer Leena Sobeih got engaged to husband Tom, she knew that she wanted to wear two looks for her nikkah, or religious ceremony, in Manchester. “I want to honor my heritage and incorporate traditional [dress] into part of the day, and I wanted to do a more modern take on it for another part of the day,” she tells Vogue over Zoom from her studio.
After deciding to wear a traditional embroidered thobe and matching veil sourced from Jordan for the ceremony itself, Sobeih began work on a second look for the reception. Narrowing down exactly what she wanted was difficult to start with, though she landed upon her label’s signatures: a corset and matching tiered skirt, made using upcycled materials (another of the designer’s MOs). “The big thing for me was [reflecting] my brand, and the style that I like to wear, which is really girly and flirty, and has a lot of historical elements from the Victorian era,” she explains. “I was trying to just find the best way to combine [that], so I felt like myself, but also have an element of my culture and my tradition.”
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One thing the designer was set on was incorporating tatreez, or traditional Palestinian cross-stitch, into her design. “It’s something that’s been part of our culture for a really, really long time,” the designer explains. “When you look at old Palestinian garments, they always have tatreez on them. Each motif represents something—you can essentially look at a Palestinian piece, and based on the cross-stitch, tell where that lady has been, where she’s had that cross-stitch made, where she grew up—it tells a story.”
Preserving the craft is crucial to Sobeih—who moved to Manchester from Gaza as a child—particularly within the context of the ongoing displacement of Palestinians, long before, as well as after, October 7. “[Tatreez] was something that a lot of women used to make their money off,” she says. “So when the nakba [the displacement of around 750,000 Palestinian people in 1948] happened, that was a big source of income that was lost for so many people, because of [the challenges of] importing textiles and thread.”
On experimenting with different colors and motifs, Sobeih realized that she didn’t want to create a purely white look—deciding to embroider her wedding corset using red thread, instead. “The red stuck out to me, which worked perfectly, because traditionally in Palestinian culture, a lot of tatreez is red,” she says, describing how she featured the tree of life motif at the center of her design. “It represents resilience, stability, and reflects, like, a tree’s persistence in the Palestinian landscape.” Indeed, the motif is even more meaningful “as a symbol of hope,” given that Sobeih has extended family in Gaza currently. “It’s just been the worst time,” she says. “There are no words to describe the feeling of worry and sadness. It’s really hard to put into words.”
For Sobeih, marrying Tom—who wore a keffiyeh on the day—offered a rare glimmer of hope during a devastating time. “Every single photo taken that day is remembering our resilience and our resistance through fashion,” she concludes. “The most important thing for us was to honor my culture.”