DUBAI: Last month, Saudi fashion designer Yousef Akbar was all over the news as US actress Sharon Stone wore one of his creations to the 2023 Women’s Cancer Research Fund gala in Beverly Hills.
Stone isn’t the first celebrity that Akbar has dressed, either. Since the launch of his brand in 2016, Akbar’s avant-garde creations have been championed by other A-listers, including American supermodel Chrissy Teigen and former Destiny’s Child star and Beyoncé bandmate Kelly Rowland.
Being a fashion designer was never a childhood dream for Akbar, he tells Arab News. He studied supply-chain management at university and — outside of academia — was a keen, and talented, ten-pin bowler.
Akbar says that during his childhood in Jeddah he used to love sketching and drawing, but a career in the arts was not something he ever considered.
“Being an artist or a designer was so unthinkable that it wasn’t even worth dreaming about — it was completely out of the question,” he says.
Akbar’s parents were fairly traditional and wanted him to focus on a steady career for his future, so he spent most of his adolescence studying. In his spare time, he went bowling. He was good enough to earn a spot on the national team, competing at the 2006 Asian Games in Doha where Saudi Arabia won a bronze medal in the team of five event.
“We were very successful, and King Abdullah invited us to the palace to reward us,” Akbar says. “We were asked to write a letter with our request (for the reward), and I asked for a scholarship for higher education, which was granted.” Soon after, he headed to Australia to study logistics and supply-chain management at the University of Sydney.
As a student, he loved going on shopping trips with friends. Although he couldn’t splurge as much as he would have liked to. “Coming from a regular middle-class family and being on a student allowance, I didn’t have thousands of dollars to shop. Also, I couldn’t find the type of clothes I wanted to wear in regular menswear stores,” he explains. “So, towards the end of my Master’s degree, I started looking for fashion courses where I could learn to make my own clothes.”
He signed up for a fashion design degree at Ultimo, a technical and further education college in Sydney. Initially, he was disappointed in the course.
“Once I got in, I thought I would be able to pick tailoring as a subject — you know, learn how to make a jacket for myself and get out of there. But tailoring was a second-year subject, so I had to complete the first year to get there. Additionally, womenswear was compulsory in the first year, which really annoyed me — I was barely interested in menswear, let alone womenswear,” he says.
However, as he got into the swing of things and started learning about design, something clicked, and Akbar discovered this was something he wanted to take seriously. “Once I had that realization, I worked hard and was fortunate enough to graduate top of my class in 2016,” he says.
Despite his collection being well received and Teigen wearing one of his dresses to the 2016 American Music Awards, the sales weren’t coming through. He contacted countless buyers and stores without getting a response. It got to the point where if someone wrote back with a “No,” he would take solace in the fact that they had at least looked at his collection. Then, in 2017, a disagreement with a PR agency in 2017 meant that his brand had to hit pause temporarily. “They scammed me out of my money, putting me out of business,” he says. “So even if I had an order, I had no resources to make it. But it was a life lesson, and now I’m wiser.”
Akbar now works out of a design studio in Sydney with a small team on a freelance basis and often commissions artisans in India to produce his embroidery.
