About Aurès

I'm Fatima Zahra, a designer based in Paris, by way of Algeria, Switzerland and New York. I was born in Algeria and raised from eight months old in Zürich, with a stretch in Geneva. I've spent much of my life moving, drawn to other places and the way they live: their cultures, their traditions, their languages. Underneath all of it runs the same constant: a love of image, and of design in every form.

Aurès is named for the mountains I come from, the range in eastern Algeria, near where I was born. There's a quiet symmetry to it: I grew up surrounded by the mountains of Switzerland, and the two have always rhymed in my mind. The name holds both at once, where I'm from and where I grew up, in a single word.

Aurès the studio is what came of all that. At its heart it's a non-seasonal womenswear label, made from luxury deadstock fabrics and handmade here in Paris. Non-seasonal, because I don't design for a calendar. Deadstock, because the most beautiful materials often already exist. Handmade, because it's the only way I'd want to do it. Jewellery and smaller pieces grew alongside the clothes, the same eye at a different scale.

The honest part: making things this way, by hand and in small numbers, is far harder and slower than I expected. Finding the right materials and the right hands takes time. I could rush it. I've chosen not to. What you see here is a beginning, built in real time.

This is also a place for everything around the work: the designers and interiors I keep returning to, the references behind a collection, the things I'm saving and loving. Fashion, objects, the spaces we make our own. If clothing is the centre, then design in all its forms is the point.