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Fashion During Wartime

At Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, the pre-eminent fashion college in Israel, graduate shows went on despite bomb warning sirens.Credit...Rafi Daloya

Last Tuesday, as most of the fashion flock was filing into the Palais de Chaillot to watch the Armani Privé haute couture show — idly musing, perhaps, on whether or not Caviar Kaspia might have a free table one evening or whether Emma Watson would appear in yet another front row — Leah Perez, the head of the fashion program at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, the pre-eminent fashion college in Israel, was attending a different kind of show, wondering about very different kinds of questions. The kinds of questions that would probably never occur to her peers at the Istituto Marangoni or Central Saint Martins or the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“It was about 6:30 p.m., and we were starting the first of two graduate shows,” she said. “There were about 700 people in the audience: parents and tutors and journalists and celebrities, like the actress Keren Mor and the architect Amir Mann. The music was very loud, as it usually is in a show, so you couldn’t really hear anything else. And then all of a sudden everyone started getting text messages on their mobile phones that the sirens were going off, and the rockets were coming to Tel Aviv. We were in a big exhibition space with no bomb shelter. So I had to decide if we should evacuate or not.”

She decided not. “The students deserved to have their work be seen,” she said. “And life goes on, no matter what is happening outside. Almost no one left. There was a kind of electricity in the air, and a sense that we were defying the situation. But afterward I could not sleep at all. I just kept thinking of all those people I had been responsible for. ...”

The idea that fashion is worth this kind of risk — that fashion would matter at all in a conflict zone amid questions of life and death and geopolitical diplomacy — may strike most people as anomalous, and possibly even absurd.

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The designer Rowan Shaaban’s clothes for Shenkar 2014.Credit...Rafi Daloya

Indeed, even before the current conflict in the Gaza Strip began, when I told friends I was going to Israel to explore its fashion world, the response was largely a raised eyebrow and something of a snort, the implication being, “Don’t they have more serious issues to think about than clothes?”

“I know it seems ridiculous,” Ms. Perez said. “I was in school during the Yom Kippur War, which was terrible. And we were studying about Picasso’s wife. And I said to the tutor, ‘Really, who cares about Picasso’s wife?’ But it becomes a statement about the belief that good and beauty will prevail. Otherwise what is the option? That you succumb to hatred and ugliness?”

It’s not a rhetorical question nor is it only an Israeli issue. Rather, Ms. Perez’s words are emblematic of an unexpected truth: In almost every country that is traditionally considered a danger zone, there is fashion.

There is fashion in Afghanistan. Ukraine held its Fashion Week in Kiev in March during the height of the political turbulence over the Russian occupation. Zambia, one of the poorest 30 countries in the world, has a Fashion Week. Last year, Colombia held a big celebration in honor of the 25th anniversary of inexModa, its fashion and textile industry showcase, which included a show from the designer Haider Ackermann held before Colombia’s first lady, various ambassadors and the mayor of Medellín, in an effort to change the national narrative from the drug trade and its related death toll to the fashion trade.

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Silver embroidery in the style of a traditional prayer-shawl pattern on silk from Maskit’s original line.Credit...Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

In Israel, Ms. Perez’s fashion program has more than doubled in size, going from about 25 in each class in 1994, when she first took over, to 41 graduates this year, with 60 in the entering class. Though Shenkar has traditionally been the best known of the fashion colleges, two competing schools, the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and WIZO Haifa Academy of Design and Education, are also enjoying increasing popularity. And three years ago, Tel Aviv Fashion Week was restarted after a 30-year hiatus, this despite the fact that of all the young designers who graduate from Israeli design schools, go abroad for internships and then return to introduce their own lines, only half, if that, are still in business a decade later.

Partly this is a function of trying to be an entrepreneur in a tiny market where high-end fashion brands are largely eschewed in favor of high street names, including two major Israeli companies, Castro and Renuar. But even beyond the obvious problems, there are issues specific to Israel that mitigate against introducing new fashion labels: the death of the local textile industry, once among the biggest in the world; the rise of cheap foreign brands like H&M; and a lack of formal structure. (There are no showrooms, and stores take most clothes on consignment, meaning if they don’t sell, the designer is responsible for the excess inventory; and there is no central governing body like the Council of Fashion Designers of America or the Camera Nazionale della Moda in Italy.)

Not to mention tepid government support compared with, say, an industry like technology, and the fact that, as Assaf Shem-Tov, a young designer who founded the brand Colle’cte with her husband, Tal Drori, said, “I think a lot of the money goes to the army.”

Yet, although there are Israeli fashion success stories outside Israel — Alber Elbaz, the much-feted creative director at Lanvin, who is a Shenkar graduate; Gottex, the swimwear brand founded in Tel Aviv in 1956; the New York designers Elie Tahari and Yigal Azrouël; Kobi Halperin, another Shenkar alumnus who is creative director at Kenneth Cole — most of the graduates at Shenkar continue to dream of working in their homeland, not the fashion capitals of Paris or Milan.

Naim K. Qasim, for example, a young Arab designer who graduated from Shenkar in 2001, worked in New York, Istanbul and Italy before returning in 2007 to “bring my vision to my community.” He operates an atelier in the Arab community of Tira with his sister making one-off dresses for special occasions. Nadav Rosenberg, who briefly interned for David Koma in London after graduating from Shenkar in 2010, opened his label Northern Star, which has a light, graphic urban aesthetic, in 2012. Mr. Rosenberg only recently managed to move out of his parents’ home, which was also his studio, to open a live/work/boutique space in Tel Aviv.

Given the hurdles, it’s hard to avoid wondering why.

“Fashion connects all people,” said Mr. Drori, who interned at Azzedine Alaïa in Paris and Donna Karan in New York before returning to start Colle’cte. “It can be a bridge across color and religion.”

Still, though this sounds vaguely political and though there are political undercurrents in some Israeli fashion brands — Dorin Frankfurt, for example, a sort of Israeli Ann Taylor, established her business in 1975 on the premise that all labels say “designed and manufactured in Tel Aviv,” and owns her own local factory specifically created to hire workers of all cultural identities — there is a notable lack of overt sloganeering among young designers.

There are exceptions. One footwear student in Shenkar’s graduating class had, as her senior project, shoes with the Arabic word “freedom” sculpted in three dimensions on the soles, so whoever wore them would leave an unmistakable trail. But in general, the clothes themselves are not about conflict, cultures colliding or any of the topics an outsider looking in might expect.

“It’s strange, I think,” said Orit Freilich, a senior lecturer at Shenkar. “I ask my students sometimes, ‘Don’t you want to make something that deals with the situation around you?’ But they say no. They want to dream of something else.”

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Sharon Tal, who runs the Maskit fashion house in Tel Aviv with her husband, at the Maskit home in front of a portrait of Ruth Dayan, the label’s founder.Credit...Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

This is exemplified by a reborn company called Maskit, a.k.a. Israel’s first (and possibly only) luxury fashion house, which was created in 1954 by Ruth Dayan, the former wife of the Israeli soldier-statesman Moshe Dayan, to use traditional Palestinian, Druze, Lebanese and Jewish embroidery techniques on contemporary luxury clothing, thus creating jobs for immigrants and elevating the cultural heritage of the region. Though wildly successful in the 1960s (Audrey Hepburn wore its famous egg coat), it closed in 1994. Last year, a husband-and-wife team, Nir and Sharon Tal, who had worked, respectively, at Deloitte and Alexander McQueen, bought it back along with the investor Stef Wertheimer (one of Israel’s richest men, and the founder of Iscar, an industrial tool manufacturer he recently sold to Warren Buffett) with the aim of creating a “local luxury brand.”

Although they are going through the motions of adopting Maskit’s fashion diplomacy when it comes embroidery, the Tals seem just as, if not more, focused on creating a business model for other would-be designers: a context for the next generation to imagine a route to a career within Israel. To really make this work, they will have to up their aesthetic signature (at the moment, the clothes are largely nice reinventions of past styles), but the very existence of their goal reflects the opportunity for an alternative future that is at the heart of fashion’s allure. No matter where it is.

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Original sketches at Maskit in Tel Aviv. Maskit was founded by Ruth Dayan, former wife of General Moshe Dayan, in 1954 and is being restarted by Sharon Tal and her husband, Nir Tal.Credit...Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

“You know it was a sheer coincidence, but the song we closed the graduate show with was from one of the most beloved poets and singers in Israel, Arik Einstein,” Ms. Perez said. It played just before she stood up to announce that the Champagne after-party had been canceled, and that everyone should go back home and be safe (defiance in the name of aesthetics only goes so far).

“Everyone was in tears,” she remembered, though not because people were overcome by what was going on around them, or because of the release of tension, but because the song reflected the more essential point of the exercise. “The title is, ‘You and I Will Change the World,' ” she said.

Put another way: hope. In Israel, as in other countries in extremis.

Vanessa Friedman is the fashion director of The New York Times. Unbuttoned will appear weekly in Thursday Styles.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section E, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fashion During Wartime. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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