Long before there was any idea of a fashion brand, an Egyptian grandmother had an entire brand of her own, hidden in a place that only she and the other women in her family knew, and that place was her closet. Her closet, in and of itself, was the brand, and she was both the trendsetter and the curator, dressing and accessorizing out of her love for self-expression, without being tied to or held down by any global trend or external opinion. The only opinion that mattered was the emotional relationship she had with her clothes, and, above all, her bag. It was here, in their grandmother’s closet, that sisters Mounaz and Aya Abdel Raouf, founders of the renowned brand OKHTEIN, began to build the emotional core of their brand. It was through the little, often overlooked details that their grandmother paid attention to, such as how a piece of clothing or a pair of vintage eyewear could say so much about a person’s life and character without them ever having to utter a single word. “My first fashion memory was just sitting with our grandmother. She had this…
