Can you remember when you felt trapped inside clothes that didn't express the real you inside? Well a new trend of T-shirts with Arabic slogans and calligraphy has now gone viral. T-shirts have now become a statement, an identity and a form of resistance. Dad House T-Shirts is one of the young designers' projects. “The day we started designing our Arabic T-shirts, we kept on thinking: why do we always wear T-shirts with foreign languages written on them? We have Arabic, the language of the Quran and Egypt. Why aren't we more proud of it,” asked designer Hadi Said on his Facebook page. First created some three years ago, Dad House T-Shirts produces shirts that are not only fashionable, but are also good to live with. Saeed started his dream at age 19, with only the support of his friends to help him. It was quite challenging, something that has been reflected in the lyrics of the Eskenderella band, often quoted and printed on Saeed's shirts. Pop Out is a company with similar ideas. The starting point of the Naim Brothers' designs was a “dissatisfaction with the clothes we found. So we decided to design our own slogans to put on clothes, and after a while people started offering to buy them,” Mohammed Nae'em, a graduate of the faculty of commerce, said. Mohamed and brother Karim developed their idea in a new way by asking people to send in slogans that could then be printed on T-shirts. “As the business grew, we made sure that our designs would be optimistic, helpful and funny to put a smile on people's faces and at the same time would be at reasonable prices,” Naim commented. The T-shirts were an instant success. Mohamed Nassar is a college student who wears clothes with Arabic slogans written on them. He finds them to be not only stylish and unique, but also very comfortable and at reasonable prices. “I find what I think about most of the time written down in a sentence on a shirt. They're eye-catching and they express me freely,” he said. It would be hard to miss Nas Trends in Cairo's malls. The store was originally a project of two American University of Cairo (AUC) students, but since then it has played a major role in mirroring the country's youth culture and developing society. The words written on the brand's shirts represent how many young people feel. The designs for any new line are sent in and then put on Facebook to be voted on, making them evidence of young people's views since 2009. Ahmed Reda is the managing director and one of the founders of Nas Trends. The idea was “to put Egyptian society on a T-shirt made in Egypt with Egyptian fabrics,” he said. “First, we wanted to produce and sell inside Egypt. Second, we wanted to give an opportunity to talented people to be discovered.” Reda said that meeting these two goals was not always easy. “Material is getting more expensive, the electricity goes off in our factories, and either we will have to raise our prices or we will need to move our production to China,” he commented. The five founders of Khotwh T-Shirts had similar ideas when they started their company in 2009. The idea was to fight back against western culture through clothes. “We wanted to deliver messages about all the positives in people's lives, and the easiest way of doing that was through a T-shirt that everyone can see,” said Mahmoud Said, one of the founders of Khotwh. Said said that even though T-shirts were the easiest way to reach their goal, they also produced pins, bags and scarves. The company also asks people to send in the things they're interested in, with these later being turned into slogans. “We think about what other values we should deliver messages about, with the result that our latest collection was about the World Cup,” Said commented. However, before all these companies there was Zafir T-Shirts, a fashion line that started with a small store in Zamalek in 2006. The shirts aim to capture the Egyptian personality and culture not only with Arabic words but with all kinds of slang, designs, or even well-known quotes from movies and plays. The now popular shop started as a tiny business between three friends determined to promote localism and show society a new perspective with clothes made of Egyptian cotton and made inside Egypt. Zafir started the idea of buying a design to be printed and sold in the shop and paying its designer a set price or a commission for every piece sold. Ahmed Allam, a psychologist, said that the T-shirts produced by these companies went beyond a present trend. Even though he said it was hard to generalise, it may be that many young people “are looking for ways of being noticeable, and such T-shirts are more eye-catching than plain ones. Others see them as having a message they want to deliver, and then there is the pride in the Arabic language, which is one of the main reasons behind these clothing projects.” The oldest one of all is the Al-Kamees Group, which started in 2004 when a few friends from the faculty of applied art wanted to find ways of increasing usage of their mother tongue. They went beyond just designing T-shirts with Arabic slogans, but also produced bags, pencil cases, and held exhibitions of their products. The writer is a freelance journalist.
