Global models to attend Modest Fashion Week

Halima Aden will attend this year's Modest Fashion Week in April. (File/ Getty Images)
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Updated 26 February 2025
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Global models to attend Modest Fashion Week

DUBAI: Models and influencers including Halima Aden, Mariah Idrissi, and Rawdah Mohamed are set to attend the 10th edition of Modest Fashion Week from April 14-16.

This year’s edition will be held in Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, with previous iterations having been held in Istanbul, Dubai, London, Riyadh, Amsterdam, and Jakarta.

In 2025, organizers expect fashion labels from 10 countries to take part, with a schedule of masterclasses, workshops and panel discussions also on the agenda.

Think Fashion and Miral Destinations are partnering to host the event, with Liam Findlay, CEO of Miral Destinations, commenting: "Hosting the 10th edition of the Modest Fashion Week on Saadiyat Island Abu Dhabi, a globally recognized event in the fashion industry, is a significant milestone.”

The event will draw star power in the form of Aden, Mohamed and Idrissi, who have hit the catwalk for luxury brands during their careers.

Aden has walked the runway at New York Fashion Week multiple times and was also a member of the judging panel at the 72nd Miss Universe pageant in El Salvador in 2023.  She shot to fame for being the first woman to wear a hijab in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant in 2016, where she was a semi-finalist.  




Mariah Idrissi will attend this year's Modest Fashion Week in April. (File/ Getty Images)

Somali Norwegian model Mohamed, who has an eyewear campaign with Italian label Dolce & Gabbana under her belt, has worked with brands like Boss and H&M and is also a regular on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet in France.

Mohamed walked the Roberto Cavalli show in Dubai in 2024 and previously told Arab News that she “sort of stumbled into modeling” after a mutual friend put her in touch with her manager while she was at university studying for a degree in behavioral analysis and healthcare.

Mohamed said: “I went to a fashion show in Oslo at the end of 2018 where I met my manager. He told me about what they were doing and I went to his office for a meeting and I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a model but I wanted to work in fashion.”

Born in north west London to Moroccan and Pakistani parents, model Idrissi made headlines when she became the first hijab-wearing model to front a major fashion campaign for H&M in 2015.


‘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."