Okhtein’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection looks to Siwa for inspiration, but it’s not just about surface aesthetics. The luxury Egyptian label’s pieces pull directly from the oasis’s textures and symbols. The colours move between sun-bleached neutrals and saturated tones borrowed from carpets and salt lakes.
The campaign was shot entirely in Siwa, across dunes, palm groves, and weathered stone. Conceived by Rue Creative Studio under the title Elevation, it blurs the line between documentary and fantasy. The creative direction itself is loaded with atmosphere: natural light, just desert and fabric and form. “Siwa speaks for itself. I didn’t want to decorate it or make it exotic,” Ahmed Razeek, the campaign’s director and founder of the Paris-based studio, shares. “I wanted to listen to it, and for people to feel that quietness, that mystery, like the land itself is watching.”
Women stand against sandstone ruins, ride through dunes on horseback, or wade in crystalline water. The bags aren’t styled as add-ons, they’re treated almost like artefacts within the frame. “We were also inspired by The Song of Siwa: The Marduk–Iskander Festival by Louis Grivetti, a poetic and vivid portrayal of Siwa’s culture and people,” co-founder Aya Abdelraouf says to YUNG.
The silhouettes borrow from Siwa’s unhurried curves, circular forms that echo the oasis itself, carved into leather and raffia without harsh lines or forced geometry. “In Siwa, nature is deeply woven into daily life, you can taste it, see it, and feel it in every detail,” Mounaz Abdelraouf, Okhtein’s co-founder, CEO and creative director, shares. Materials like engraved leather, raffia, straw, brass hardware, and couture fabrics become carriers of story: henna symbols etched into surfaces, kilim-inspired weaving folded into bag panels, palm weaving techniques reworked as textures. Even brass fish charms, nodding to fertility symbols from Siwan culture, are reframed as playful jewellery for the bags. Silhouettes are fluid, organic, and unstructured, nodding to Siwan architecture where curves replace sharp angles.
Craft has always been Okhtein’s (Instagram) anchor, and here it stretches across geographies. Palm weaving techniques from Siwa sit next to raffia from Spain, embroidery from India, and leatherwork from Italy. This season saw collaborations with artisans across continents, anchored in Siwan traditions of palm weaving and jewellery beading.
At its root, the campaign is about drawing on Siwa’s layered heritage without freezing it as folklore. “For me, it was about capturing what Siwa feels like today, not yesterday,” Razeek adds. The founders talk about engaging “all five senses” in design, not only the look of kilims or salt dunes, but the feel of raffia, the rhythm of palm weaving, even culinary and healing rituals. The campaign and activations lean into Siwa’s reputation as a place of healing and spirituality. The circle, an architectural and cultural motif in Siwa, from rooftops to salt spheres, becomes both a literal design shape and a metaphor for community and connection. “The Siwan tribe weaves the circular shape into almost every aspect of their architecture, from windows and tables to rooftops and the salt balls used as décor,” Mounaz shares.
This is carried through not just in product silhouettes but in campaign gestures: a circular dinner setting, round food presentations, and activations like sound healing workshops and sensory tastings. As the sisters put it, “Our goal was to bring the heart of Siwa to Almaza, allowing our guests to truly feel that connection.”
What comes through most clearly is the tension Okhtein seems to enjoy sitting in: Siwa as heritage, Almaza as luxury. “Though the two destinations are just four hours apart, Sakhra offered a unique common ground, a luxury setting that modernizes Siwan culture, mirroring our own contemporary interpretation of the collection,” Aya Abdelraouf says.
In other words: the collection isn’t trying to recreate Siwa literally. It’s more about placing fragments of it into new contexts, a woven texture reimagined as a luxury bag, or a traditional charm recast in metal and light.
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