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Tala Abukhaled tells me her ideas rarely start with a sketchpad. Most begin on her couch in Riyadh with the window open. She waits for whatever detail happens to catch her attention that day, the shadow a tree throws across the wall, or a shape she has walked past for years without ever really looking at it. “A lot of the time you have so much around you, but because it’s familiar to you, you don’t see the potential in it,” she explains. “When you take a moment to actually notice what’s around you, you see all the potential that it has.” It is a slower, quieter way of arriving at a collection than most young labels admit to, and it goes some way toward explaining why Rebirth, only four years into its existence, already reads like the work of someone who has been looking closely at her own country for far longer than that.

Abukhaled founded her brand at the end of 2021, not long after moving back to Saudi Arabia from Dubai, where she had trained in fashion design and pattern making at Esmod. Her graduation collection there became the first version of Rebirth, one she now describes as almost unrecognisable next to what the label has become, an early run of streetwear pieces, hoodies and sweatpants, in a category she quickly realised was already crowded. The shift came during a Ramadan pop-up, where she introduced macrame for the first time and watched her small capsule collection sell out in a way none of her streetwear had. “I really found something that was missing in the market,” she shares. “People wanted to see something original.”

That instinct for craft over mass filters through everything the designer makes now—most visibly in her use of raffia, the fibre stripped from palm fronds that she works into skirts, neckpieces and fringe with the kind of attention usually reserved for embroidery. The material is not incidental. Abukhaled’s own name means small palm tree, and she describes a long fascination with the trees themselves. There was an inherent desire to take a plant everyone in Saudi Arabia grows up around and prove there is more to bring to life than just hats and floor mats. Production runs between Saudi Arabia and Italy, with raffia work and embroidery sourced through a partner factory in India, and nothing in the collections is made ahead of demand.

The name Rebirth also carries a specific meaning Abukhaled is careful to underline. “It’s not about creating something new,” she explains. “It’s about creating something out of something that has been overlooked, a material, a silhouette, and using it to its fullest potential in a way that’s relevant to us today.” The designer traces the whole ethos of her brand back to a single afternoon in a shopping mall as she looked over racks and racks of identical fast fashion pieces she knew would end up in landfill within a season. “It just gave me such an overwhelming feeling,” she recalls. “I never want to do this to our community, or to Earth.” The Rebirth woman she designs for now is one who dresses in direct opposition to that feeling. She is freespirited, drawn to materials with some history to them, and unwilling to wear what everyone else already owns.

Rebirth has since grown past clothing into Rebirth Studio, a quieter art offshoot that has already placed 84 pieces inside a hotel on the Red Sea, several of them wearable garments framed and hung as artworks in their own right, a commission that arrived after a buyer saw her Red Sea Fashion Week show and asked what else she could make. Her next collection, debuting at Riyadh Fashion Week in October, grew out of a residency spent partly in France and partly in AlUla, merging palm weaves and materials native to the region with silhouettes she refined in Paris.

When Abukhaled talks about the next five years of her label, she speaks in terms that go well past clothing to touch on everything from homeware to artwork. An artisanal 360-degree vision built around the spirit embodied in the brand’s name rather than a single product. Listening to her describe it, calm and certain of every detail, it is hard to imagine the ambition outpacing the resourceful woman who is weaving it into being.

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Images: Supplied