Dina Shaker’s ‘Suspension’ Floats Through CDW at Tamara Haus

Cairo’s Downtown boutique hotel Tamara Haus became a stage for Egyptian designer Dina Shaker’s latest collection, Suspension, during Cairo Design Week. Known for merging architectural thinking with fashion, Shaker presents Fall 26 as a meditation on Cairo itself, a city built on countless layers, where Egyptian, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, Ottoman, and European histories coexist without erasing one another.At the center of these overlapping narratives stands the Egyptian woman, suspended between inherited truths and imposed identities, between the geometry of her origin and the architecture of everything that has pressed itself upon her. Suspension explores this tension through elongated, distorted, and intentionally unfinished silhouettes. Shirts stretch beyond proportion, sculptural tops feel more like memories than garments, and double-layered trousers hint at unseen complexity. Fragility becomes structure and structure becomes memory. The collection invites women to question inherited beauty standards and reclaim their own identity.“Suspension is a collection that speaks to the multilayered cultural hybridity of Egyptian identity,” Shaker says. “We approach this from an architectural perspective. When you walk through downtown and older urban areas, you see buildings from different eras and styles coexisting. They blend together seamlessly, without ever feeling out of place.”The installation at Tamara Haus extends the concept of suspension into space. As part of Cairo Design Week, which brings Egypt’s finest designers, artists, and cultural entrepreneurs together, the hotel became an immersive canvas. Garments floated on invisible threads, made from transparent organza, appearing as drifting silhouettes that were present yet bodiless. Inner seams, tulle linings, and doubled layers were exposed, echoing the collection’s insistence on revealing the inner architecture of identity. In this suspended world, clothing exists in a liminal state, neither worn nor grounded, where air, gravity, and absence shape the experience.

The film at the installation, portrayed by Artist Karima Mansour, brings the collection to life through movement. Her gestures and choreography translate the suspended, in-between states of 'Suspension' into living, weightless forms.