Feature: Arwa Al Banawi for adidas Originals
Arwa Al Banawi was an investment banker before she was a designer, which is not a sentence you write about many people in fashion.
Why she started
She left banking in 2015 for a straightforward reason: she couldn't find clothes that worked for a professional woman and still looked like something. Not the false choice between a suit and everything else, but the actual gap in between. So she made them.
What's followed has been consistent about where it comes from. Al Banawi has been explicit that her work is about communicating her Arab culture outward, and about what women in the region are doing — not as subject matter borrowed for a season, but as the thing the label is for.
What she did with the Forum
The Forum Low is a 1980s basketball shoe and one of the more rigid shapes in the adidas archive — high ankle strap, hard panels, not much give in it. That makes it an odd choice for a designer whose clothes are soft and tailored, which is probably why it works.
Her version is off-white canvas with suede overlays, in tones taken from the landscape rather than from a colour chart. Sand, bone, dust. There's gold co-branding, and a small jewel sitting on the lace.
The detail people notice is the heel. A red and white woven check, drawn from traditional Arab textiles, set into the panel at the back where you'd normally find nothing at all. It's the one loud thing on an otherwise quiet shoe, and it's the part that tells you whose it is before you read any branding.
The Ibex
Her stated reference for the design is the Ibex — the wild mountain goat that lives across the Arabian peninsula, in terrain nothing else bothers with.
The campaign takes that literally, and is much better for it. Rather than a studio, they went up a mountain and shot among a herd of actual goats: a model walking a scree slope in white trousers and white trainers while the animals ignore her completely. Somebody made a decision there, and it wasn't the safe one.
The other frames are more domestic — a patterned sofa placed outdoors against rock, a shoe photographed on brocade. The whole thing sits between the mountain and the sitting room, which is roughly what the shoe does too.
This came out in May 2021 and we don't have it now. What we currently stock is in our adidas collection.