Islamic Fashion in Los Angeles: Designers, Style and Community
Islamic fashion in Los Angeles takes shape through people who make clothing, organise events and explain what they want their appearance to express. Their accounts reveal the work and decisions behind a public image, bringing garment design into conversation with faith, creativity and everyday life.
This guide follows particular designers, creators and community projects, including connections between Los Angeles and nearby Orange County. The locations matter: an Irvine event belongs to the wider Southern California story, rather than being a boutique in downtown LA. Historical collections and gatherings also belong to their own dates.
For someone developing a modest wardrobe, these accounts offer different starting points. They show how an idea can become clothing, how personal preferences shape a collection, and how a wearer may explain its meaning. You can appreciate that work while deciding which approaches suit your own circumstances and religious practice.
How particular clothing needs became creative work
Marwa Atik: giving the headscarf its own detail
In Angilee Shah's 2012 reporting for LA Weekly, republished by IslamiCity, designer Marwa Atik shops for trims and cloth in downtown Los Angeles before a Fashion Fighting Famine show in Irvine. The account follows an actual piece of work: choosing materials, changing an idea when a different colour appears, and preparing scarves for the runway.
Shah describes Atik's early charcoal scarf with a brass-coloured zip along its edge, followed by designs using ruffles, pleats and decorative fronts. Atik explained that a headscarf could obscure the detailing on a blouse. Putting the interest on the scarf itself responded to that particular dressing problem.
That is a useful way to understand decorative hijab design. The detail has a location and a purpose. If your scarf covers much of your upper outfit, its visible edge or front panel can become the place where you express a preference for texture or colour. The idea begins with how the garment is worn, then develops through the maker's choices.
Mohajababes: another route into eveningwear
Afra and Eiman Ahmed described a different beginning in Margari Aziza Hill's 2013 interview. After relatives and friends asked about their kaftans, the sisters developed Mohajababes, launched in November 2011. Their account connects California and London, with garments selected from Dubai for customers seeking more eveningwear options.
They discussed hand-embroidered details and a palette expanding beyond darker colours. Showing the collection on women with different bodies and skin tones was another deliberate choice. Selection and presentation worked together: the founders wanted prospective customers to encounter variety in the garments and in the people wearing them.
This was a collection assembled through the sisters' judgement about the kaftans they wanted to offer. Their contribution lay in choosing the garments and presenting them to customers in different places. For a reader exploring occasionwear, the useful detail is the combination of an eveningwear form, embroidered decoration and a widening colour range. Those features could create varied effects within the same broad garment category.
RAYAN: long sleeves within an eveningwear collection
Los Angeles-based sisters Nadia Rayan and Nora Rayan Ghaneian discussed their label with Yara Souza for Egypt Today in December 2013. Their account began with dresses made for a family wedding in Egypt and developed into a collection built around long sleeves and full-length silhouettes.
The report describes peplums, draping, bright colours and A-line forms in their early work, followed by plans for richer textures and metallic or sequinned effects. The sisters identified influences ranging from vintage Hollywood to contemporary eveningwear designers. Their shared interest did not produce identical personal tastes: Nora discussed ornament, while Nadia leaned towards retro references.
For a reader seeking formal modest clothing, the example shows why the garment's original design matters. Sleeves and length can be part of the eveningwear concept from the beginning, allowing decoration and proportion to develop around them. You can look for that relationship in a dress you already own or are considering: does its visual character work with the coverage you want, or does achieving that coverage require rebuilding the outfit?
Design preferences can be precise without becoming rules
Colour and print placement around the face
In Yusra Siddiqui's interview with Atik for Who What Wear, the designer describes a detailed colour-development process. She considers seasonal palettes, undertones and how a shade appears beside the face, returning to samples until the colour matches her intention.
Printed scarves present another problem: the position of the pattern once the fabric is wrapped. Atik explains that she considers which part will frame the face. She also discusses a scarf accessory, the Vela Hoop, as a way of extending the arrangements possible with the cloth.
Her campaign ambitions run alongside those design decisions. She wants a wider range of Muslim women to appear in the images, including women whose experiences or appearance are less visible in familiar fashion portrayals.
The connection is useful when looking closely at a scarf. A colour is developed for its position against a person, and a print is planned for a textile that will fold and move. The finished image therefore represents several choices: sampling, pattern placement, arrangement and the person invited to demonstrate the design.
Volume, jewellery and the maker's own taste
A February 2012 interview on The Hijaab adds a more personal view of the Mohajababes founders. Afra described collaborating from the United States with Eiman in the United Kingdom. Email updates and video calls helped them exchange feedback across the time difference while selecting materials and designs they both liked.
The conversation also records precise styling preferences. They liked scarves with volume, naming stiff polyester and raw silk, and were drawn to greys, neutral shades and dark, bold prints. Eiman favoured large bags. Afra enjoyed necklaces long enough to remain visible beneath a headscarf, along with bangles and bracelets.
Afra described several kaftan treatments, including belts, beadwork around higher necklines and details continuing down the front of U- or V-shaped designs. These details show how the collection offered different places for visual interest.
Their personal tastes help explain the presentation around the garments. A necklace's visible length, the height of a scarf and the position of embroidery can each alter the balance of an outfit. The interview records the sisters' own preferences at that time.
Aysha Harun: a familiar garment, a personal combination
Originally from Toronto, Los Angeles-based creator Aysha Harun described her beginnings in a 2024 HOLR interview with Samantha Vecchiarelli. In 2011, aged sixteen, she used her father's camcorder to make a beauty video. She had enjoyed watching tutorials but had not seen a creator who resembled her: a Black Muslim girl wearing hijab.
Harun recalled deciding to pursue the work full time after completing her business administration degree in 2017. Travel, food and fashion became subjects alongside beauty. She described taking ideas from her own life and experimenting with editing styles, recipes and clothes while giving them a personal treatment.
Asked about spring dressing, she chose a maxi skirt with a cardigan, leaving the lower buttons undone for her preferred silhouette. Her explanation locates the styling decision in a small adjustment to familiar garments.
That combination sits within a larger creative practice. Harun's work encompasses the finished outfit, the way it is filmed and the other interests shared around it. The clothing is one part of the person viewers encounter.
Warm-weather choices begin with the whole outfit
In an April 2024 interview with Miami Living, Harun described her preference for linen tops, trousers, blazers and long dresses in warmer months. She liked combining a flowing top with tailored trousers, and finding pieces that accommodated her preferred shape and coverage.
She also described using mock-neck cropped tops with an integrated bra beneath garments with open backs or deeper necklines. For her, that arrangement reduced the number of separate layers. She explained these as preferences developed through her own wardrobe.
The same conversation records an interest in developing clothing herself. Harun said she had begun experimenting with designs and samples towards a future modest fashion line. It was a project in development when she spoke, not an announced finished collection.
Read together, those details connect wearing and making. A creator can notice a recurring problem in her wardrobe, describe the arrangement that helps her, and begin exploring whether a new garment might address it. Her account preserves the distinction between an outfit preference and the later work of developing a design.
Events helped people meet the makers and each other
Fashion Fighting Famine brought different preferences together
Lilledeshan Bose's June 2012 Artbound report places Fashion Fighting Famine in Irvine and traces its beginning to UC Irvine students in 2007. Creative director Asmaa Hassanein described using fashion to raise money for charitable causes. The reported event combined a lobby bazaar with a runway presentation in UCI's Pacific Ballroom.
Bose described beaded abayas, headscarves with an acid-washed finish and maxi dresses among the clothes shown. Operations director Nida Chowdhry explained that the audience held different understandings of modesty, so the invited collections needed to accommodate varied preferences.
Attendee Zamzam Abdulwahid supplied a vivid example: a pleated silver maxi with a mint jacket and bright pink shoes. She connected her pleasure in colour with her religious commitment and described the scarf as a reminder of faith.
The occasion brought those positions into the same room. Its fashion interest lay in the range of garments and the meanings participants gave them. Abdulwahid's combination also shows how pieces from different settings could form one deliberately modest outfit.
Perfect For Her connected clothing with women's working lives
In Sara Jamshidi's July 2019 interview and preview, Hassanah El-Yacoubi described plans for the sixth Perfect For Her convention in Irvine. A fashion presentation and marketplace were to sit alongside discussions about the work and responsibilities surrounding a creative business.
The programme included a panel on combining motherhood with entrepreneurship and another on the intentions and effects of public influence. Workshops addressed building a business, working in a crowded industry and developing a profile in digital media. These subjects gave attention to the people sustaining the fashion activity and the collections being shown.
El-Yacoubi spoke as a mother, doctoral student and organiser. She described wanting Muslim women to explain their own lives and to feel supported in their religious identity. Her earlier work had included selecting modest clothing from different brands, giving her experience of bringing a range together.
The preview records an ambition to make a fashion gathering a place for those wider conversations. Because it appeared before the convention, its programme remains an account of what was proposed, rather than a record of every session's outcome.
Local life can remain connected to family elsewhere
Harun's March 2024 conversation with Cliché Magazine describes another kind of connection. She and her husband were observing Ramadan in Los Angeles without relatives nearby, developing their own home traditions while missing her family in Toronto.
She described cooking together and decorating with mosque and crescent shapes, containers for dates, lanterns and lights for the evening meal. Those domestic details made her home part of the celebration. For Eid, she planned to return to Toronto, where family prayer, brunch and time with her cousins formed familiar parts of the occasion.
Harun also explained how her public content had gradually expanded beyond beauty and fashion. An Eid video in 2016 had opened a route into sharing more of her religious life. She valued both the recognition it offered Muslim viewers and the opportunity for other viewers to encounter celebrations unfamiliar to them.
This account gives her LA-based creative work a wider setting. Clothing content existed alongside cooking, family relationships and religious occasions. The city was part of that life, while attachments to Toronto continued to shape what she chose to share.
Similar clothing can serve different communities
Victoria Gonzalez's 2019 Los Angeles magazine report brings Muslim and Jewish fashion voices into the same local discussion. Atik said that some Vela customers were Jewish or Christian, and that the scarves could be worn as head coverings or used differently. Other interviewees described customers whose reasons for choosing fuller coverage extended beyond a single religious community.
In the same report, LA native Marwa Biltagi described modest dressing as a way of deciding how she presented herself. Her explanation concerned her own agency, rather than a benefit that every woman must experience through the same clothes.
These accounts help distinguish a garment's possible uses from the meaning a wearer gives it. Two people can appreciate the same long dress or scarf for different reasons. A useful conversation can begin with the shared interest in the item, then leave space for those differences. Someone buying a scarf for a holiday and someone wearing it as part of religious practice may ask different questions about it, even when both admire the same colour.
Creative identity includes the stories around the clothes
Marwa Biltagi: fashion, art and a life across places
In Reham Al-Awadhi's 2017 interview for Khaleejesque, Biltagi explained the editorial ambition behind Mademoiselle Meme. After studying art history, she moved from Los Angeles to Oxford in 2013. While studying Arabic there, she began considering a publication that could bring fashion, travel, food and the arts together. She launched it after moving to Scotland the following year.
Biltagi connected that outlook with her Irish-Palestinian and American identity. She wanted to feature artists and makers who were not already familiar to her audience, and to curate subjects beyond her personal life. Looking for modest clothing had itself encouraged her to explore brands, travel and make things.
Her account also includes an encounter in an LA café. Gary Baseman and another artist drew Biltagi and a friend in their headscarves; she recalled feeling pleased that their appearance had inspired the work.
That memory belongs to her particular experience. Alongside her editorial choices, it shows the connections she made between dress, artistic attention and the places through which her life had moved.
Biltagi also described limits to that visibility. In Annachiara Biondi's September 2019 Vogue Business report, she questioned the difference between inclusive messages on a runway and the people invited to watch. She had often found herself the only woman wearing hijab in the audience. Her observation asks a specific question about participation: who gets a continuing place in the conversation? A striking image of inclusion and a sustained working relationship are different achievements.
At UCLA, performance offered another way to speak
A May 2016 Daily Bruin report by Gabriella Kamran describes preparations for the Hijab Monologues at UCLA. Director Merima Tričić wanted a creative setting for discussing Muslim experience, using performance alongside the more familiar lecture format.
The proposed programme included poetry, dance, comedy and personal accounts. Participant Damali Stennette discussed the relationship between being Black, being a woman and being Muslim. Tričić explained that she worked on making the pieces understandable to an audience unfamiliar with some of the terms.
This belongs beside the commercial fashion story because the meaning of a visible garment is also shaped by the people who speak about it. A performance gives its creator choices about language, pacing and what to disclose. The audience encounters a person developing an account, rather than trying to interpret her from her clothes alone.
For a reader interested in local creative culture, that widens the possible starting points. An arts programme, student publication or public conversation may reveal aspects of dress and identity that a shop window cannot explain.
A campus event connected clothing with different ambitions
Geoffrey Elbaz's corrected March 2017 Daily Bruin report describes UCLA's Hijab Day. The Muslim Student Association invited campus members to try a headscarf and held a panel on hijab's history and contemporary meanings. Marya Ayloush supplied scarves from her company, Austere Attire.
Design and media arts student Hajar Azzam spoke about pursuing a creative field while wearing hijab. She wanted the choice to sit comfortably alongside ambitions that others might not automatically associate with Muslim women. Alumna Nabilah Abdelaal, then an oncology research assistant at UCLA, described being visibly Muslim while undertaking cancer research.
Their contributions extended the occasion beyond arranging fabric. Each linked dress to a different area of work, making an individual life visible within a shared event. Abdelaal also acknowledged difficulties with fitting in, while remaining positive about her own choice.
Ayloush described her personal experience of Southern California as comparatively tolerant. That was her assessment, alongside concern for women facing hostility elsewhere. The report therefore holds local confidence and awareness of unequal experiences together, without making one participant's account stand for everyone.
Agency, access and representation need careful attention
Faith and personal choice belong in the explanation
In her 2017 WISE essay on modesty and fashion, El-Yacoubi argues that women who choose a headscarf should be understood through their own convictions and decisions. She also acknowledges that some women face imposed covering, and that one account cannot represent every circumstance.
Writing as an American Muslim involved in modest fashion, she connects religious practice with freedom of expression. Her argument places the wearer within both identities: participating in American life while giving visible form to a religious commitment. Fashion can be one way of expressing that relationship.
El-Yacoubi also describes pressures from different directions. Women may encounter assumptions that covering prevents independence, or criticism of how they interpret modesty. Her response is to ask for attention to the choices and convictions of particular women.
That perspective connects her interest in clothing with her wish for women to describe their own lives. In her account, a garment can carry religious meaning while also being a considered creative choice.
Visibility can bring companionship and an unwanted burden
Anna Syed's September 2020 Daily Bruin photo essay records several UCLA women's accounts. Andalib Ismail described the connection she felt on recognising another Muslim woman wearing a scarf on campus. The visible garment could make a sense of companionship immediate.
Nada Elquosey, who had moved from the United Arab Emirates to the United States at seventeen, described feeling comfortable with her choice at UCLA. She also recalled challenging a professor's negative presentation of hijab. Her confidence included a wish to explain an experience she knew through wearing it.
Eman Magzoub described a more tiring side of visibility: questions that arrived with assumptions about oppression, or an expectation that she would defend her upbringing and choices. She distinguished a productive conversation from one intended to police her.
These accounts give the campus setting several meanings. Recognition could offer reassurance, an academic discussion could invite correction, and another encounter could place a burden on the wearer. The women were discussing the same visible garment, but the surrounding relationships changed what the experience felt like.
Cultural appreciation also involves who is represented
UCLA columnist Sidra Rashid raised another concern in a May 2017 Daily Bruin opinion column. She criticised Vogue India's anniversary cover featuring Kendall Jenner and the use of a headscarf on Vogue Arabia's cover with Gigi Hadid. Her argument concerned who receives visibility when a publication draws on a community's visual culture.
Rashid linked that criticism to her own earlier discomfort with her Desi heritage. She considered what a young reader might understand about beauty and belonging from the people chosen for magazine covers. To her, opportunities for representation mattered alongside the appeal of the finished image.
She also questioned whether using a headscarf as an aesthetic element gave enough attention to people who wore it within their religious lives. This was her critical position, rather than a settled rule governing every act of cultural exchange.
The column adds an editorial voice to LA's wider fashion conversation. It asks readers to consider the relationship between clothing imagery and the people offered a platform. That concern can coexist with an appreciation of the skill involved in making an image.
A visible fashion scene still needs usable sizes
In a 2024 Newsette interview, Harun described difficulty finding modest clothing that accommodated her body and preferred fit. In her experience, some ranges stopped at XXL, while the garments themselves could fit more closely than she expected from the label. She wanted designers to take those gaps seriously.
Her own searches combined several requirements. She filtered for long sleeves, maxi lengths and extended sizes, allowing room to choose the more relaxed fit she preferred. The issue was the availability of those features together, rather than the presence of a modest-looking outfit in a photograph.
Harun also described developing her merchandise line, Happy Looks Good on You, with plans for further collections. Her own output existed alongside her experiences of searching other makers' ranges.
The interview connects a creator's public visibility with specific clothing needs. Harun could enjoy presenting outfits and working on her own projects while identifying shortcomings in the options available to her. That criticism concerns the clothes she could find and the fit she wanted, rather than any failing in the person searching for them.
Useful design has to work beyond the photograph
In Grace Zhuang's May 2026 Daily Trojan feature, USC lecturer and designer Keanan Duffty argues that fashion needs to address people whose practical requirements have been overlooked. His examples include modest dressers, older people and wheelchair users.
He gives a specific construction problem: clothing designed around a standing body can gather at the front and rise at the back when the wearer is seated. His point is that usefulness depends on understanding how a person actually wears the garment. He also discusses the pressure of ideas appearing online before a designer has had time to develop them.
The same report includes USC student and Seevan founder Vikram Sagar describing a jacket incorporating fabric from his mother's wedding sari. He linked wearing it with the importance of that family memory.
These are contributions to a broader local fashion discussion. Duffty emphasises practical requirements, while Sagar explains the personal meaning within one garment. Both give substance to the question of what design contributes to a wearer's life: an accommodation in the cut, or a relationship carried into everyday use.
From a clothing problem to a local making process
LEIA: developing a prototype with its intended wearers
In a December 2019 interview with Authority Magazine, Michèle Jochem Yunus described developing LEIA, her modest activewear label. A textile engineer before moving from Germany to Los Angeles, she explored the idea after Muslim friends spoke about difficulty finding activewear that suited wearing a hijab.
She bought a sewing machine and worked on prototypes around a full-time job. Friends supplied feedback from the early stages, helping refine the pieces. Finding Sew FYI, a design workspace in downtown Los Angeles, brought another contributor into the process. By the interview, she described an ongoing relationship with the same design and patternmaking studio.
Presenting the work required experimentation too. A promotional video was initially too long for the social format she wanted to use, so the team developed shorter edits and still images from it. She also described using polls to understand audience responses.
The account locates the label's development within a series of exchanges: between textile knowledge and design, between prototypes and their intended wearers, and between a small business and its collaborators.
SOLIKA: from altering dresses to developing a collection
Los Angeles designers Sarah Elharrar and Chaya Israily described another beginning in Kylie Ora Lobell's July 2019 Jewish Journal interview. Before establishing SOLIKA in 2013, Elharrar had bought two identical dresses and combined them into one that met her preferences. She also recalled designing her bat mitzvah dress and experimenting with sketches and fabrics.
The friends preferred a minimal aesthetic and wanted clothing that would achieve it without several extra layers. Their search in downtown LA's fashion district led to a patternmaker who helped develop a fifteen-piece collection. They described presenting their work through pop-ups and trunk shows in Los Angeles and New York.
Their Jewish upbringing remained part of the story. Both had worked in extracurricular programmes at Bais Chaya Mushka Chabad in Pico-Robertson, and they connected their creative work with teachings about using personal talents positively.
Israily also recalled showing at a Muslim fashion event in Irvine. That connection places the label within a wider local conversation about coverage, while preserving the designers' own background and the distinct clothing preferences from which their work developed.
Good Apparel: casual clothing and a developing workout range
In a Career Wanderlust episode published in January 2026, Amina Salami distinguished her earlier work with dresses and abayas from the direction she was developing through Good Apparel. Introduced as the founder of an LA-based label, she described moving gradually between employment and running a clothing business.
At the time of the conversation, the casual line had begun, while modest workout pieces remained in development. Salami discussed responses to prototypes, including interest from women who did not cover their hair. She identified T-shirts and California-themed hoodies and shirts among the casual pieces.
Salami connected her interest in clothing with her own experience of being curvier and wanting comfortable coverage. She had spent time concentrating on a previous clothing business, returned to employment, and then resumed working on the new venture full time.
Her earlier dress business, casual range and workout prototypes represent different stages of clothing work. The episode captures a formative period when new pieces were still being developed, with responses from potential wearers contributing to what the founder hoped to make.
Finding clothing and making plans in Los Angeles
Begin with an identifiable place and a current enquiry
The LA Fashion District's own shopping guidance distinguishes retail from wholesale businesses and advises contacting particular stores about their hours. Its website also provides shopping and fabric-and-notions directories. These are useful starting resources for locating a business, rather than guarantees that an individual shop carries suitable Islamic clothing.
If you are looking for cloth or trims for a modest outfit, identify that purpose before planning a visit. A fabric supplier, a finished-garment shop and a designer offering appointments provide different services. Ask which service is available and whether the business sells to individual customers.
Keep the enquiry tied to what you need: a particular type of material, an opportunity to try garments, or advice about an existing piece. An old designer profile can introduce a name, but it should not supply today's opening hours or stock information.
This approach also prevents a wasted journey across the region. Confirm the actual address and appointment arrangements before treating an online reference to Southern California as a destination in Los Angeles itself.
Further reading for your wardrobe
For practical help with your wardrobe, our complete abaya guide covers cuts, fabrics and measurements. Our discussion of creativity, choice and representation in Islamic fashion explores how clothes and the people presenting them can be understood together.
Understanding the work behind a local fashion scene
These accounts show several ways of participating in Islamic fashion in Los Angeles and its neighbouring communities. Making clothing, selecting a collection, arranging an event and describing an experience all contribute something different. Looking closely at those contributions gives the subject a human scale.
For a reader, the value lies in being able to recognise that variety. A garment can answer a practical need, express a preference or become part of a relationship with faith and place. The most informative accounts leave room for the people involved to explain which of those meanings matters to them.