There is a particular kind of lateness that exists somewhere between chaos and care. The extra outfit change. The final mirror check. The conversation that somehow stretches for another hour. The goodbye that turns into another coffee, another laugh, another story. For Kotn SS26, these moments become the point.
Titled Five More Minutes, the brand’s latest campaign transforms delay into intention, exploring the emotional texture of womanhood through softness, humour, indulgence, and presence. Created in partnership with Sarah Bahbah, the campaign centres Arab women in a way that feels both cinematic and deeply familiar: overdressed, overpacked, expressive, emotional, and always slightly late.
Rather than treating slowness as a negative, Five More Minutes frames it as ritual. The campaign draws from intimate stories and shared behaviours gathered from women across the region and diaspora, capturing the small gestures and unspoken rhythms that often define closeness. Getting ready becomes a communal act. Waiting becomes part of the experience. Presence matters more than punctuality.
At the heart of the campaign is a refusal to flatten femininity into a singular identity. The videos, the images, they go to prove that Arab women cannot be placed into a box, all are unique, their rituals, their styles, themselves, they are all different. That openness runs throughout the project, which approaches femininity as layered, self-defined, and constantly shifting between softness, performance, humour, glamour, and vulnerability.
Visually and creatively, the campaign brings together a cast reflective of that same multiplicity. Sarah Bahbah leads the project as director, joined by Romy Nassar and Noor Elkhaldi in the video cast, alongside Rola Ghorab and Abdulaziz Al Hosni for the lookbook imagery. Together, the casting moves beyond straightforward representation and instead builds a broader emotional atmosphere around memory, ritual, and self-expression.
The campaign also taps into something culturally recognisable without reducing it to stereotype. Arab femininity here is expressive and expansive, rooted in gathering, storytelling, beauty rituals, and emotional richness, but never fixed into a single image. Instead, Five More Minutes lingers in the in-between moments: the anticipation before going out, the overstaying, the long conversations, the deliberate refusal to rush.
In a culture increasingly shaped by speed, optimisation, and immediacy, Kotn’s SS26 campaign offers something slower and more intimate. Not escapism exactly, but permission. Permission to take longer. To romanticise the process. To exist fully within moments that don’t need to be efficient to matter.
Because sometimes, five more minutes is the entire story.
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