Meet the new face of Tima Abid Haute Couture.

Fashion is a field that is always evolving with new designs making trends every year. When Tima Abid started her brand 17 years ago, her daughter Sultana was only 4 years old. “Since then, she was always with me in the atelier watching me work playing around with fabric. I would place a mannequin and give her some fabric and let her design whatever her imagination guides her to” Tima said. Now years later of heading her eponymous brand, Tima Abid passes the baton to her brilliant and fashionable daughter Sultana Bukhari At the age of 21, Sultana is ready to bring her vision and ideas to reality amping up the creative direction for the haute couture brand applying her knowledge of fashion communication gained from Conde Nast College of Fashion and Design in London.

But Sultana’s journey began when she was a young girl.  “I grew up playing around with what my mother gave me. I would make up dresses and stitch them for my little doll. When I first dressed it, I designed and made sure about the process of creation and that I could wear it was maybe at the age of 10. But, honestly, all I knew was that I’m going to be working with my mom when I’m older” Sultana said. 

After returning to Jeddah, she took her time to understand their brand’s base, analyzing how the market had changed, including where the brand was headed.

This made her look into the brand beyond the numbers, making her analyze why few of the brand’s customers weren’t coming back. This was when the mother-daughter duo devised a new strategy together, one that would take the brand to new heights. 

As a GenZ designer, Sultana sees things a bit differently aiming to understand the latest fashion trends, “A lot has changed in the last 5 or 6 years. So this affected our clients and it affected me as well so we had to take this very realistic look at what’s actually going on and where the brand’s positioned right now, and where we want to be as well.”

One of the first things that she developed further for the brand was their social media presence with a new bold strategy with their newer posts being distinctly different from their past social media content.

“We plan to post more now, but all the credit goes to Abeer Ahmed, who is a photographer and Zeit Al Lowzi is a professional retoucher who helped us out with the final results of our latest campaign.”

As we moved into a conversation on one of the designs, we began comparing the aesthetic of the brand in its entirety to the new Demi Couture line launched by Sultana “It’s much more chill and each dress is made for the practical woman that likes to be stylish and embrace their femininity, it’s ready to wear but the Demi-Couture line is to stay but works in parallel with the Haute Couture. It’s not like the Haute Couture is blindsided or it’s put away.”  

“The brand’s core values and our identity also revolve around instilling confidence in women by encapsulating their inner and outer beauty, Because fashion is also construction and you have to understand the body that you’re dressing in and the way you dress.”

Towards the end of our conversation, we spoke about how it feels to be handed over a business that was spearheaded by her mother, and if she was intimidated at all. After a brief pause, Sultana answered.

“I always saw my mom as my strength, she was a symbol of strength, of beauty, and femininity which I appreciate so much, but she taught me so much that I feel like today, we both think alike when it comes to fashion”