Hand painted combination overgarment tunic – UAE

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Object History 

Azza Al Qubaisi, often referred to as the UAE’s first Emirati jewellery designer, is an artist, sculptor, designer, and entrepreneur. A fierce advocate of all that is home grown and sustainable, she has established two governmental projects to support and develop crafts.

This example created among a handful of others by a group of UAE female artists and donated to the Zay initiative, during an afternoon spent together to celebrate UAE women empowerment at the home of the Zay Initiative’s founder 2018.

The artists worked together during a four-hour session, each placing her individual style on silk. The fabrics where then collected and a combination (thawb) and (kandurah) gown (thawb_kandurah) was designed out of each artwork to be preserved in the artist’s name within the Zay collection.

Object Features 

The artist chose to paint (rasm) her signature five petal flower symbol using white and grades of blue, in addition to washing the white silk in grades of blue paint.

The silk fabric was then transformed by Dr. Reem Tariq El Mutwalli into the inner tunic dress (kandurah).

White silk tulle (tur) hand embroidered with uniformly scattered white pearls was used to create the upper overgarment (thawb). The neckline was modernised using a pearl encrusted collar to join the two garments together into one. The same was applied to sleeve cuffs (swarah) or (hyul) on the inner kandurah, emphasising the simplicity of form and allowing the hand drawn motifs to pop-up. The back was left simply accentuated by a train (thayil).