Dubai Fashion Week announces Autumn-Winter 24/25 dates as it competes with the big four

Dubai Fashion Week (DFW) announced its Autumn-Winter 24/25 dates via a billboard in Times Square, New York. (Supplied)  
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Updated 11 January 2024
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Dubai Fashion Week announces Autumn-Winter 24/25 dates as it competes with the big four

  • The announcement made via a billboard in Times Square, New York

DUBAI: Dubai Fashion Week (DFW), Dubai’s official fashion week co-founded by Dubai Design District (d3) and the Arab Fashion Council, has announced its Autumn-Winter 24/25 dates via a billboard in Times Square, New York.  

The third edition of the fashion week – set to take place from Feb. 4-8 – is aiming to set the tone for the season as Dubai will, for the first time, lead the way in the global fashion calendar ahead of New York, London, Milan and Paris.  

With its new scheduling, Dubai Fashion Week aims to strengthen global visibility and attendance and attract more global buyers, key opinion leaders and industry experts. 

Mohammed Aqra, Chief Strategy Officer of the Arab Fashion Council, said in a statement: “I cordially invite all fashion aficionados, buyers, and media representatives to mark their calendars for February 4 to 8, 2024, and witness the evolution of fashion at its finest. By shifting the dates, we position ourselves strategically before New York Fashion Week, creating an optimal window for global visibility and buyers attendance, and we assure that we will re-meet the global buyers and industry experts again at the end of the season in Paris. We look forward to sharing more updates on the upcoming edition soon.”  

The October 2023 edition of DFW launched with an exclusive presentation by global luxury fashion house Carolina Herrera, with the brand’s Creative Director Wes Gordon and former Victoria’s Secret model Sarah Sampaio in attendance, and wrapped up with a bang when global supermodel and icon Naomi Campbell walked the DFW runway for Rizman Ruzaini.  


‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

Updated 24 January 2026
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‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

The film is by directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. (Supplied)

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."