INTERVIEW: Bazaar founder Lydia Akram on modest fashion, Egypt's homegrown retail revival - Style - Life & Style

Al-Ahram Weekly

5 days ago

In this Ahram Online exclusive, Lydia Akram — founder of LA Market and a pioneer of Egypt's modest fashion bazaars — talks scaling up, spotlighting local brands, and why Cairo is becoming a regional shopping destination.
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In mid-July, Akram hosted her eighth fashion-plus event of 2025 at the Egyptian International Exhibitions Center. The three-day exhibition featured over 250 Egyptian brands offering everything from modest clothing and kids' wear to home décor and prepared foods, drawing over 20,000 visitors.
For Akram, this is more than a business milestone. It's the culmination of a vision that began in 2018, when she first launched LA Market as a one-woman initiative, with just 20 brands and a small social media campaign. The debut event drew 2,000 visitors—less than one-tenth of the most recent turnout.
Akram, a logistics management graduate and mother, saw an early gap in the Egyptian retail space for stylish, modest clothing—years before 'modest fashion' became a global trend.
She explained that there was always demand for modest dressing, but many women, hijab-wearing or not, were tired of clothes that were awkwardly adapted to be modest, rather than designed that way from the start.
The 2016 currency devaluation had already made imported fast fashion prohibitively expensive for many. This shift in consumer behaviour created an opening for affordable, well-made local alternatives.
Today, Akram heads a 25-member team and works with more than 300 homegrown brands, with another 2,000 on the waiting list. But she insists that the real story is 'about the wonderful job the many good local brands have been doing.'
'I really think what the local brands have been offering in general, but specifically in terms of modest dressing, is the core of the success story,' Akram said. 'Obviously, we are very particular about who joins our LA Market, not just in terms of quality but also in terms of making sure that it is really and truly 100 per cent Egyptian from styling to production.'
According to Akram, the success of these local brands is similar to that of the LA Market – and for that matter other brands that do not necessarily specialize in modest fashion: 'it is an incremental process of catering for the local taste with high quality products – not just in terms of clothing, although this remains to be the number one item on the list of purchases, but also in terms of skin care, beauty products, home décor and more.'
The COVID-19 pandemic also reshaped the retail landscape, Akram explained.
'When people were confined to their homes and were surfing the net to do all kinds of shopping.'
With the relaxation of the pandemic restrictions, she recalled, people were still not very keen to move around crowded shopping malls.
Bazaars held in open spaces proved to be a very attractive idea. 'Luckily, because of this, my business did not die; I was scared that it was going to be crushed with COVID, but it turned out that the pandemic created some new spaces,' she said.
Local production, Akram argued, expanded in the wake of the pandemic, with some people having used the time to think through long-procrastinated business plans or to decide on a new career path. Many new local brands came out across the board in the year after the pandemic, she insisted.
Post-pandemic, LA Market has also gained international traction.
'We actually get visitors who are coming from many Arab countries, Europe and North America who actually book their flights to town in line with scheduled bazaars,' she stated.
She also receives many foreign shoppers in a permanent store she set up this year for a selected choice of 80 local brands 'specifically for modest wear.'
'I think we do have some really impressive local brands that deserve a lot more attention, and the way forward is to try to take these brands to the international market – somehow,' Akram added.
Her next ambition is to help these brands break into global markets.
Helping these brands export their ware, Akram said, would expand the volume of their production, and this, 'by definition', could take them to the mass-production threshold, which is necessary to get the prices down. 'I am aware that some people are complaining about the pricing of local brands, but it all relates to the volume of production,' she added.
She stresses that around 95 per cent of the brands working with LA Market are women-led schemes, including some projects specifically designed to help women of all socio-economic brackets expand their income, fulfil their passion, and maintain good cognitive functions.
Currently, Akram has around 300 local brands on the business partners list. 'And we have some 2000 others on the waiting list; this is to indicate the growing volume of local brands,' she concludes.
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