TEAM PLAYER

International England Hockey player turned fashion designer, Nadine Merabi, Cofounder and Creative Director of her namesake luxury ready-to-wear brand, is empowering women through fashion while celebrating her Lebanese heritage

- RAWAN HASSAN

Direct-to-consumer glam fashion brand, NADINE MERABI, marked another milestone in its journey on June 14, 2023, releasing its first official resort collection following the success of its main line partywear, bridal, and recently-launched SS23 collections. With the resort collection, the brand is branching out from occasion wear to make it more wearable and inclusive. “In autumn and winter, you’ve got Christmas parties, you’ve got nice meals out with the girls where you can wear MERABIs; but in the summer, unless you were going to a wedding or a day event or a brunch, you didn’t really have an occasion,” says Nadine Merabi, Cofounder and Creative Director of her eponymous brand. “I wanted more people to experience the brand. So, the idea is to have a wider range of options.”

Trying to build stories for women, by women, to celebrate women while thinking about different prints, fabrics, and countries, the self-taught seamstress built the new multi-drop model collection piece by piece, starting with the now-released 13 styles in the Drop 2 Sol de Aqua collection. Further drops will launch across July and August 2023, while a second resort collection will be released in January 2024. “It just started and escalated to the point I had to cut the resort collection down. I had to split it, so half of it is launching next January as well because there was just too much,” says Merabi. She is also testing swimwear as well as other summer pieces. “It was about a year and a half in the making, which is a lot longer than a normal design process, but I wanted to get it right.”