Hijab Fashion in Italy: Designers, Everyday Style and Women’s Voices

Hijab fashion in Italy becomes more interesting when the question moves from what is supposedly trending to who is making, wearing and discussing the clothes. A scarf can belong to a personal wardrobe, a designer’s collection, a fashion photograph or a fictional character’s costume. Each setting asks something different of it. The wearer’s religious meaning deserves room alongside the creative work of choosing colour, proportion and texture.

This account follows named voices and dated projects, tracing personal wardrobes, design work and the conversations around fashion images. It is a history of particular contributions, rather than a nationwide ranking of popular looks. The dates matter: an early interview records what someone wanted or experienced then, while a later collection opens a different chapter. Together, these accounts offer a more useful starting point for understanding Italian hijab fashion than an anonymous list of seasonal essentials.

An Italian-language conversation about style and belonging

One early chapter appears in Annalisa Frisina and Camilla Hawthorne’s research on young women in Italy, published online in 2017. Their study describes Hijab Elegante, a Facebook page established in April 2012 by an Italian Moroccan woman identified as K.N. She wanted a discussion of Muslim fashion and beauty in Italian, alongside questions about being Muslim in Italy.

The researchers describe pressures she encountered from different directions: demands to remove the scarf, and criticism that her appearance was insufficiently modest. The page offered somewhere to discuss those tensions with other women. Fashion here included the language in which a person could explain herself, not merely the arrangement of fabric.

The study drew on interviews and focus groups with a particular group of young Muslim and Afro-Italian women, mainly in Milan and Padua, during 2014–2016. Its value is the detail of those encounters. It cannot tell us which scarf was most popular across Italy. It does, however, preserve a specific early example of women creating their own space for fashion, disagreement and belonging.

Hind Lafram: designing from a Turin wardrobe

In Fabiola Palmeri’s June 2016 interview for la Repubblica, Hind Lafram spoke of Turin as home and described changing from accountancy studies to fashion training at the city’s Istituto Zerboni. Sharing her work online had brought requests from friends. Her design problem was concrete: she wanted long, loose summer clothes that felt light without being transparent, while retaining the colours and shapes she enjoyed.

She discussed jersey, lace, silk and prints, alongside maxi sweatshirts, colourful swimwear, wedding dresses and sports scarves designed without pins. She was commuting between Turin and Milan for a fashion project while researching her own label. The variety makes her brief tangible: a formal occasion and a training session ask for different clothes.

What makes this account distinctive is the combination of technical training and a personal clothing need. Lafram was deciding how an outfit should look and what it should allow its wearer to do. The headscarf sat within that larger design brief. Colour and proportion were part of her authorship, alongside the coverage she wanted for herself.

Lafram added an earlier domestic chapter in her May 2018 conversation with Tgcom24. Her mother had given her a sewing machine before secondary school. She began with dolls’ clothes, then made trousers for herself and her sister. That progression places experimentation and family life within her fashion history, before a formal label enters the story.

She recalled opening a Facebook page in 2014 and establishing her label in May 2017. Her explanation of modest fashion emphasised expressing personality through the clothes and treating it as one creative direction within fashion. She also described making garments for women of other religions who liked the designs.

That account invites a more precise reading of her work than a simple division between Muslim and non-Muslim clothing. The intention behind a design and the reasons someone else wears it can differ. For Lafram, a garment could begin with her own wish for coverage and still interest a wearer for its shape. Her description establishes an open creative ambition; it does not make every piece suitable for every woman or erase differences in religious practice.

Her career was not a seamless success story. In an October 2019 interview with Dire Fare Mole, Lafram said the company Modest Fashion Italia had closed the previous year and that she was rebuilding her project. She also recalled registering the label and presenting her first official collection at Torino Fashion Week in 2017.

The same interview gives substance to her idea of a complete wardrobe. She described four sporting outfits associated with running, swimming, tennis and horse riding, alongside day and evening clothes. Her point was that a Muslim woman could have different activities and occasions to dress for. These examples describe that collection’s scope, without establishing the performance or present availability of any garment.

Lafram also spoke about working with small businesses around Turin and choosing materials including cotton, silk, linen and wool. The local relationships matter as part of her own production account. They connect her design story to people and places beyond the finished photograph, while the interruption in the business prevents an overly neat narrative of uninterrupted expansion.

Bologna: making room for different choices

Albachiara Re’s June 2018 Vogue Italia feature brought Lafram’s Turin work into conversation with Keltoum Kamal Idrissi in Bologna. Kamal Idrissi described her wish to expand the clothing choices available to women like herself through Hijab Paradise. The feature placed her Italian identity and Muslim faith together, rather than treating one as an exception to the other.

Its clothing examples included an everyday combination of a denim jacket, long skirt and simple blouse, as well as more elaborate occasion dressing. That range matters: a discussion of hijab fashion can include familiar casual separates alongside garments made for celebration. An outfit does not need to look ceremonial to express its wearer’s preferences.

The feature also recorded Lafram’s admiration for Giorgio Armani and her interest in wool and linen for different seasons. Kamal Idrissi, meanwhile, emphasised feeling comfortable with her ethics and her view of the world as well as her appearance. Their concerns joined material choices with personal meaning. Creating a garment and selecting a wardrobe were different ways of expressing a considered relationship with fashion.

In Gaia Bertolino’s February 2021 interview for The Password, Kamal Idrissi explained that she and cofounder Fatiha Mouradi had wanted somewhere to see and touch scarves, compare colours and fabrics, and visit with friends. She distinguished their Italian setting and stylistic preferences from their then Turkish production, describing an Italian-made line as a hope for the future.

She also recalled people assuming male relatives must have established the business for them, while she described using the founders’ own savings. That is her account of encounters around this project, rather than a measure of every woman’s entrepreneurial experience.

A further connection was costume work for Sana in Skam Italia. Kamal Idrissi described discussions with the costume department about garments and how they were worn, and acknowledged consultant Sumaya Abdel Qader’s contribution. This gives Bologna’s story another dimension: knowledge gathered through everyday clothing choices could inform a television wardrobe. The consultation concerned a particular character and production. Its significance lies in that exchange of expertise, without assuming a fictional character can stand for every Italian Muslim woman.

Collections with different visual languages

A different design direction appeared in Alberto Calabrese’s May 2020 Vogue Italia account of Unusual 90-76. The Italian label’s Resort 2020 collection connected modest clothing with streetwear. The report described graphic contrasts, decorated abayas and swimwear assembled from leggings, a tunic and a cap.

It also introduced the designers’ coined name jabrag for an accessory drawing on hijab and durag references, with a decorated front and a fastening at the neck. This is a specific design proposal with its own name; it should not be mistaken for an established Italian religious garment or a traditional scarf shared by all Muslim communities.

The collection’s visual language was emphatic: contrasting graphics, stones and embroidery gave covered shapes a decorated surface. The swimwear, meanwhile, was described through the relationship between its separate components. These are two different kinds of design decision, one about visual effect and the other about how an outfit is assembled. Both help explain this particular collection more clearly than simply calling it fashionable. Its coined accessory name adds another layer of experimentation, making naming itself part of the creative proposal.

Fatima Asmaa Paciotti described another approach in a March 2021 Daily Muslim interview. She spoke about studying runway photographs and presentations, then considering colours, stripes, geometric patterns and fabrics for her own collection. The shapes she named included long shirt dresses, loose palazzo trousers and tiered long dresses.

Her example of two friends wearing the same short dress differently was especially concrete: one combined it with loose trousers, while the other wore it with tights. This was her illustration of how one garment could enter different wardrobes, rather than a universal judgement about which arrangement meets someone’s religious requirements.

Paciotti also discussed selecting cloth, thread and trimmings, and her intention to continue formal fashion study. During pandemic restrictions, she had spent time looking at online presentations and image galleries as part of her research. Those details bring attention to the work behind a collection: gathering references, choosing which aspects interest the designer, and deciding how to realise them. Stripes, tiers and the volume of a trouser leg become specific creative decisions within her account, rather than an anonymous list of seasonal trends.

Tasnim Ali: personal style and a fashion editorial

For an account of a wearer’s own preferences, Camilla Ghirardato’s May 2021 Donna Moderna interview with Tasnim Ali offers useful detail. Ali described oversized trousers, trainers and ankle boots among her choices. She credited her mother as an inspiration and said her first scarf was her mother’s. Her social-media work had developed during the pandemic, including videos made with her sister.

The accompanying fashion editorial explored another register. Its captions paired a tailored suit with a hoodie and trainers, and described bright prints and combinations of scarves. These were the publication’s styled looks; they should be distinguished from Ali’s statements about her everyday wardrobe.

That distinction lets both forms of creativity remain visible. A person can have favourite clothes while also participating in a shoot that tries unfamiliar combinations. The photographs’ styling is a collaboration, whereas the interview gives Ali space to name her own influences. Reading the two together can illuminate a fashion project without turning a carefully produced editorial into an instruction that every hijab wearer should dress in the same way.

Ali made her personal clothing boundaries explicit in Veronica Costanza Ward’s February 2022 Vogue Italia interview. When discussing collaborations, she said she avoided clothes that were tight, torn, transparent or close to skin colour. These were her conditions for taking part, expressed in her own terms.

They are useful to understand as a creative brief. A collaboration still has room for decisions about shape and colour, but the person wearing the clothes needs to recognise herself in the result. Ali’s stated preferences should remain attached to her: another Muslim woman may define or explain her wardrobe differently.

Ali was selective about television appearances too. She said she had accepted only one of several invitations, because she considered the context carefully and felt some programmes sought controversy rather than understanding. Her own online approach used humour to answer questions about religion and the scarf. She described that work as a responsibility and an exchange in which she also learned from followers. This adds a second part to her creative brief: deciding how to communicate, as well as what to wear.

Asked about inclusion in Anna Osei’s August 2022 Vogue Italia interview, Ali welcomed hijab visibility while saying that Italian fashion had further to go. She recalled both appreciative responses and comments describing covered women as oppressed. She valued the support offered by fashion publications without accepting that visibility settled the question.

The same conversation traced how her book, Velo Spiego, came about. Publishers and her agency had seen potential in her TikTok videos. She already enjoyed writing and had once imagined becoming a journalist: reading print coverage that linked Islam with violence had made her want a space to answer back. The book gave her another format for that response.

Ali was commenting on fashion imagery and developing a book alongside her online work. That makes the relationship between writer and subject particularly interesting here: another author was asking about her experience of becoming one herself. Her interview connects the photograph with work that continues outside its frame. The criticism and the creative opportunity both belong to her account, with writing offering more room to explain a position than an image alone.

Aya Mohamed: faith, family and clothes kept in use

Aya Mohamed, known online as Milan Pyramid, offered a personal account of wearing hijab in a Vanity Fair Italia telephone interview published in April 2021. Born in Egypt and raised in Italy, she described studying questions about her faith before deciding to cover her hair. She recalled classmates assuming her family had compelled her, despite her explanation that the decision was hers.

She also said her sisters did not wear hijab and were proud of her choice. That family detail makes space for difference within a relationship. Her own decision need not become a claim about what every member of her family, or every Muslim woman, should wear.

Mohamed wanted her online conversations to welcome questions and make her experience easier to understand. In this account, the scarf’s meaning came from her relationship with faith and her explanation of it. A fashion description that discussed only its colour would leave something out; an account that saw only a symbol would also miss the person doing the explaining. Her voice supplies that personal context without becoming a national survey.

Her fashion practice came into sharper focus in Giulia Mattioli’s August 2022 interview for d la Repubblica. Mohamed, who grew up in Milan, explained that she had started her blog in 2017 to tell her own story. She described a flexible style and spoke about wearing clothes that had belonged to her mother when she was the same age.

That is a specific account of reuse and family influence. It gives older clothes a place within a present wardrobe, without requiring a claim that the whole outfit has a measured environmental advantage. The interest is also aesthetic: an existing piece can become part of a new combination and a continuing personal history.

Mohamed discussed building outfits through layers and expressed concern about whether clothing seen in campaigns was actually available in a useful range of sizes. Her point connected representation with practical access. A photograph can show an appealing possibility, while the wearer still needs a garment she can obtain and use. The interview therefore brings creativity and a concrete criticism of fashion’s offer into the same conversation, without promising that the problem has been solved.

Fay Yabre: participation on her own terms

Model Fay Yabre described an early difficulty in Edoardo Bianchi’s March 2022 written backstage interview for d la Repubblica. She recalled pressure to remove her hijab or appear uncovered, and said that she had maintained her position. At the time of the interview, she felt she was beginning to establish her career.

The distinction is between being offered a place in an image and having a say in how one appears there. Yabre wanted modelling work with her hijab retained. Her account makes that condition part of her professional ambition, rather than an obstacle the reader is asked to imagine away.

A broader portrait appeared in Alessia Gallione’s July 2023 feature about photographer Marzio Emilio Villa. Yabre was among the participants in a fashion portrait project exploring identity in Italy. Her accompanying text described modelling, work in a nursery and plans for fashion and design study. Born in Italy to a family from Burkina Faso, she resisted reducing her cultural identity to one category.

Villa discussed his own involvement in the project and the importance he attached to understanding the people he photographed. He wanted their different backgrounds to be seen as part of ordinary contemporary life. These were his aims and his account of the working relationship, not evidence of a measured change in viewers’ attitudes.

For Yabre’s fashion story, the project adds occupations, ambitions and a self-description beyond a single image. It also brings the photographer’s position into view. A portrait is made through a relationship between people, even when the finished page looks effortless. Here, both participant and photographer were given room to explain what they wanted that relationship to communicate.

Visibility could still be uncomfortable. In Carla Mascianà’s May 2024 nss G-Club interviews with Muslim creatives in Italy, Yabre described feeling hurt by an article objecting to hijab on the runway. She also spoke about the support she drew from other creatives. Her experience holds recognition and criticism together, rather than presenting a simple arrival at universal acceptance.

The feature included other perspectives. Writer Asha Salim described the importance of faith in her life while not wearing hijab. Stylist Sabrina Salem discussed creativity and a sense of acceptance in Milan’s skate community. Their accounts should not be collapsed into Yabre’s or used to infer a shared style of head covering.

Placing these voices alongside one another broadens the cultural setting of a hijab-fashion discussion. A creative community can contain different forms of practice, different clothes and different experiences of belonging. The relationship between those people is not a requirement that they look alike. Their individual accounts are most useful when the differences remain visible, with neither a headscarf nor its absence treated as a complete description of faith or creativity.

Creating a wardrobe for a fictional Italian character

Costume offers another view of the clothing conversation. In a July 2024 interview with Francesco Sciortino for La voce dello schermo, actor Beatrice Bruschi recalled developing Sana’s appearance for Skam Italia. She described experimenting with the costume department: long skirts, wrapped head coverings, sporty hip-hop influences, colour and make-up all contributed to the character.

Bruschi spoke warmly about that creative process and about researching a role different from herself. This is an actor’s account of making a fictional person believable. Her temporary experience preparing for a role cannot stand in for the lifelong experiences of Muslim women, and a costume remains a set of choices made for a particular story.

The account nevertheless gives detail to a television wardrobe that might otherwise be reduced to the presence of a scarf. A character’s clothing can suggest taste, mood and relationships through several elements at once. Bruschi remembered the work as an opportunity to explore appearance. That is a specific creative response, valuable on its own terms without requiring a claim that the programme changed an entire audience’s understanding of hijab.

Italy as a place of international fashion collaboration

The Italian connection also includes designers based elsewhere who work with production and presentation in Italy. In Isabella Naef’s September 2025 written interview for FashionUnited, Afraa Al-Noaimi discussed her Doha-founded label’s relationship with Lombardy and the Desert Rose collection. She described Italian production as central to her plans.

The accompanying collection account connected draped volumes with desert imagery. It described materials including chiffon, cady, muslin and lightweight wool, together with decorative brooches and buckles, plus jewellery made with Carrara marble. Golden details drew on Qatari references. The collection’s concept was expressed through the movement of cloth and the contrasting presence of ornament.

This example occupies a different position from an Italian woman describing her everyday wardrobe. It concerns a designer’s chosen production relationships and a collection presented through Milan’s fashion setting. Keeping that distinction allows the Italian connection to be explained accurately. Cultural exchange can take place through a material, a workshop relationship or a presentation as well as through a person’s upbringing. Al-Noaimi’s stated plans remain intentions at the interview date; they should not be turned into guarantees about later distribution or expansion.

Al-Noaimi developed that account in an interview with Anastassia Cemin for Fashion Times in March 2026. Discussing Eastward Elegance, she described a dialogue between the Middle East and Europe, particularly Italy and Milan. Silk, cashmere and wool formed part of her explanation of contrasts between softness and structure.

She placed colour and layering at the centre of the collection, describing a dress worn with trousers, a jacket or a blouse in different combinations. She intended the clothes to be interpreted by women who wear hijab and women who do not. That is the designer’s creative intention, rather than a guarantee of suitability for every wearer.

Accessories extended the same account. She discussed bags, glasses and jewellery, and described jewellery work associated with Florence and Arezzo. These details give cultural exchange a material expression through objects and making. She also connected the presentation at Milan’s Casa degli Artisti with her wish to bring art and fashion into conversation. Her account describes a designer’s ambitions for a particular collection, with cloth, accessories and the setting of its presentation contributing to a shared idea.

Listening beyond the published fashion image

A different way into the subject appears in Sumaya Abdel Qader’s public doctoral-thesis abstract at Università Cattolica, associated with a June 2026 defence. It describes research conducted during 2023–2025 with young Muslim women, mainly in northern and central Italy, born between 1995 and 2005.

The stated methods included 100 biographical interviews, 11 interviews with key informants and two focus groups. The first 40 biographical interviews also explored wardrobes. This approach makes room for accounts of clothes in the setting of a person’s life, rather than relying solely on a finished fashion image.

The abstract presents modesty as something negotiated through visibility, comfort, context and aesthetic or ethical commitments. That is the author’s stated analytical approach. The full thesis is embargoed, so the public abstract cannot supply detailed findings or participants’ quotations that are unavailable to read. Nor should its particular cohort be treated as representative of all Italy. Its useful contribution here is a documented research design: listening closely to women and their wardrobes offers a way to investigate questions that a trend headline alone cannot answer.

What makes a useful picture of Italian hijab fashion?

The strongest questions stay close to the people and clothes: who made the choice, what occasion or activity was in mind, and how does the wearer explain its meaning? A collection can be discussed through its design decisions; a personal wardrobe through the owner’s preferences; a costume through the character and production. These are complementary ways of looking, each with its own limits.

For future developments, look for specific work and the voices behind it. A new collection, a sustained collaboration or a wearer’s account can add something worth understanding without proving that everyone is moving in the same direction. There is room to enjoy colour, texture and invention while allowing a woman’s explanation of her faith and her clothes to remain her own.