Gallabiyas Become High Fashion in Gozoour's SS2025 Collection

CairoScene

23-05-2025

Gallabiyas Become High Fashion in Gozoour's SS2025 Collection
Gozoour SS2025 delivers a floral and flowy justice to Upper Egypt's women, honouring their strength, their grace, and their everyday.
In John Launois' famous photograph, a group of Egyptian women wade through the water, their gallabiyas gathered in their hands, bare legs cutting through the current. It's a snapshot that is both defiant and deeply intimate - one that created controversy, but for many, captured a portrait of Upper Egypt that few had seen before. For Mazen Zaki, the creator behind 'Gozoour', it was simply "beautiful and inspiring'. The image didn't romanticise or sanitise; it reflected a culture he recognised and loved.
The seed, though, was planted long before the photograph. It began, as many things do, at home, with his mother.
'My mother would always wear a gallabiya,' Zaki recalls. 'When I was younger, I would wonder: 'Why does she wear that? No one else does.' Even when everything around her was changing, she stuck to her identity.'
His SS25 collection, اقلب القدرة على فمها تطلع البت لأمها emerges from that memory, from that photograph, and from the women who live in between. This collection doesn't need to lean on tropes, it's rooted in a lived reality. It moves past a sepia-toned homage to the rhythms of everyday life: of the living breathing women who walk, work, tie up their skirts and get on with their life.
'Our culture is full of incredible silhouettes,' Zaki says. 'We cross rivers, we tie up skirts, we work, we adapt. That's all embedded in the cuts.'
The collection in three words? 'Floral, colourful, adjustable.'
The words roll off of Zaki's tongue, but in the clothes, they evoke complex symbols and silhouettes. Each design draws its name, and essence, from a different Egyptian flower: tulip, rihan, yasmina, warda, narges. Think ruffled gallabiyas reimagined with structured pleats and chest-framing flounces; chiffon flowers exploding from capes like red roses spilling from a windowsill; and a sunflower look saturated in a yellow that quite literally glows.
'I wanted to make florals that feel Egyptian,' Zaki explains. 'Not pharaonic. Not imported.'
One dress takes inspiration from the Lotus flower but not the threadbare pharaonic symbol, the Egyptian flower in its more literal firm; it's the manifesto piece of the collection. Loose and languid and full of possibility, it can be cinched at the waist or left to billow in the wind. Its cuts, ties, and themes speak of everyday ingenuity: skirts tied for work, clothes wrapped for modesty, shapes transformed for survival into style.
Every pattern is original, printed in-house on a custom polyester-cotton blend.
'Polyester is necessary for printing, so we blended it with cotton,' Zaki reveals. 'It's the only way to make it work technically and still feel soft against the skin.'
Even the menswear nods to Egyptian workwear traditions. The two male designs in the collection reflect the knots, ties, and versatility of the clothing men in rural Egypt wear.
Debuting at Nutorabi, a lavish farmhouse location on the edges of Cairo, Zaki serves the collection alongside farmfresh catering of Bascoota, Arabic melodies by Tuwa. The show begins with a call, like a traditional Idra flipped on its head. The show doesn't perform Egyptian culture; it exists within it.
Gozoour's SS2025 Collection is a quiet act of justice - to the brand name, and to Egyptian fashion. It weaves together a visual archive of Upper Egypt with lived experience, refracted through Zaki's contemporary lens. In every look, there's motion, texture, and a sense of return that feels instinctual and vindicating.