The 2026 edition of the BoF 500, The Business of Fashion’s index of people shaping the global fashion industry, includes a new group of figures from the MENA region and its diaspora whose influence stretches across very different corners of the business.
And that range is perhaps the more interesting story. Fashion influence from the region is no longer confined to the designers putting clothes on runways. It can be found in the people deciding which talent gets seen, building spaces for the next generation to learn, shaping how fashion is discussed in Arabic, representing luxury houses to younger audiences, and occupying some of the most influential creative positions within global fashion.
There is no single aesthetic, profession or even market connecting the names on this year’s list. The BoF 500, instead, offers a snapshot of how widely MENA influence now travels through the industry, from the institutions being built within the region to the international fashion system itself.
Here are the MENA names on the 2026 BoF 500 you should know.
Yasmina El-Abd
Actor | Egypt / Switzerland
At 22, Yasmina El-Abd occupies an increasingly powerful space between entertainment and luxury fashion. The Swiss-Egyptian actor has established an international screen career while becoming closely associated with Dior, serving as an Ambassador across multiple divisions of the house.
Her inclusion is interesting precisely because she isn’t a designer or fashion executive. Luxury’s relationship with the Middle East is increasingly being shaped through culture and celebrity, and El-Abd represents a generation whose visibility travels across film, television, fashion and social media simultaneously.
Shahd AlShehail
Founder, CEO & Creative Director, Abadia | Saudi Arabia
Shahd AlShehail has spent years arguing, through clothes, that Saudi craft does not need to be frozen in the past to be preserved.
Through Abadia, the label she co-founded in 2016, AlShehail works with traditional techniques and artisans while positioning that knowledge within contemporary luxury. The brand became the first Saudi label stocked by Net-a-Porter, an important milestone at a time when Saudi fashion was beginning to gain considerably greater international visibility.
Additionally, Abadia represents a wider question facing fashion across the region: how do you build something internationally legible without sanding away the culture that made it distinctive in the first place?
Sarah Hermez
Founder & Director, Creative Space Beirut | Lebanon
Sarah Hermez’s influence is less about what appears on a runway than who gets the opportunity to reach one. She founded Creative Space Beirut as a free fashion school, creating an alternative route into an industry where formal education can be prohibitively expensive. More than a decade later, its graduates have gone on to work across fashion in the region.
That makes Hermez an important counterpoint within a list dominated by individual achievement. Her work is infrastructural. Rather than asking how one designer from the region can break into fashion, Creative Space Beirut asks how the region can build systems that allow more designers to emerge across the board.
Nadège Vanhée
Artistic Director, Hermès Womenswear | France / Algeria
Nadège Vanhée has spent more than a decade doing something particularly difficult in luxury: changing Hermès without making Hermès stop looking like Hermès.
The French designer of Algerian heritage has led the house’s womenswear since 2014, developing a sensual interpretation of a brand built on restraint, leather craftsmanship and longevity. Her role has now expanded further, with Vanhée entrusted with establishing haute couture at Hermès.
Among the names here, hers perhaps demonstrates most clearly how MENA influence does not always announce itself as “MENA fashion.” Sometimes it exists inside the highest levels of the global luxury establishment itself.
Zainab Alabdulrazzaq
Founder & Editor-in-Chief, 3oud.com | Kuwait
Fashion influence also depends on who documents it, contextualises it and gives it a language.
Kuwaiti editor Zainab Alabdulrazzaq founded Arabic-language luxury platform 3oud.com and Oud Fashion Talks, creating spaces for fashion conversations specifically rooted in the region.
Her inclusion points toward something the industry’s globalisation can sometimes overlook: representation is not only about putting regional designers on international platforms. It is also about having regional platforms capable of speaking to their own audiences, in their own language, about an industry they are actively participating in.
Saif Mahdhi
Talent Agent, Safe Management | Tunisia / France
Some of fashion’s most influential people are deliberately almost invisible. Tunisian-French agent Saif Mahdhi has spent decades representing major international talent, with a roster associated with names including Lana Del Rey and A$AP Rocky, while also connecting European fashion houses with MENA talent including Saint Levant and Imaan Hammam.
His presence here speaks to a part of fashion power that rarely sits front row. Agents determine relationships, negotiate access and help decide which faces enter which rooms. As global brands look increasingly toward talent from the Middle East and North Africa, those connections become part of how the region moves through the international fashion system.
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