SELECTS: Egyptian Artist Helena Shahin Builds Her Maximalist Style

You might have seen Helena Shahin on your Instagram feed, adored with whimsical jewelry and futuristic makeup or wearing a collage of colors and patterns, but the first time I saw Helena in her element was at Diana Vintage Market in Cairo. Hair twisted into colourful space buns, she moved between tables with the focus of someone who knew there was treasure to be found. Her eyes darted past silver chalices, stacks of old records and rails of clothes, somehow landing on the things buried underneath everything else.

I attempted to barter with sellers and got nowhere. Helena, meanwhile, seemed to understand bargaining as its own choreography. A joke here, a counteroffer there, a willingness to walk away at exactly the right moment. Eventually, the sellers would cave, half annoyed and half impressed. Damn, you’re good.

She is. But Helena has also been practicing almost her entire life.

“I have been thrifting with my dad since I was a baby,” she tells me. “I’m really good at it because I have even mimicked everything that he would do, understanding the techniques. I’ve practiced a lot and failed so many times.”

Growing up shopping was a family adventure. Helena, her parents, and two sisters would wake up at dawn and drive two hours to Port Said, where they would spend the day digging through clothes at Champs-Élysées. They would arrive early, armed with snacks, and stay until evening. The family would go through everything piece by piece before ending the day over a meal. She recalls, laughing, “The funniest part is that every time we go to the border control, the police would stop us and ask us why we have all these clothes? And her dad would jokingly reply I have four girls to dress.”

The ritual explains something about the way Helena dresses now. Her outfits rarely appear to have originated from a single idea, decade or reference. They accumulate. A tiny pair of sunglasses might meet a cartoonish hair shape, a patterned skirt, a sculptural accessory, several pieces of jewellery and colours that, on paper, perhaps have no business sitting beside one another. Yet on Helena, they somehow make sense.

She describes her style as “crazy, maximalist, curious,” a collision informed by everything from 1960s Egyptian cinema to the 2000s. Sherihan’s theatrical costumes and Nelly’s Fawazeer Ramadan are stored somewhere in the visual archive, alongside fashion, paintings, materials and whatever else has caught her eye.

Colour, especially, operates according to her own private vocabulary. As she describes, “I find that colours are very expressive. If you go through my profile you can tell how I’m feeling. Green is not simply green. “Green with all its shades is a melody,” she says. “It's like listening to your feelings without words.” Blue is dreamy, capable of transporting her elsewhere. Red belongs to sharper, more agitated feelings and often appears as ink outlining her work.

It makes sense that Helena’s relationship to fashion became more complicated the more closely she examined it. She entered the industry first through her sister, who asked her to draw mannequins for her swimwear brand, before going on to study fashion in Paris. But knowledge brought disenchantment. “The more I was learning about fashion, the less I got interested in it, and I hated that,” she says.

She still loved clothes; what she began questioning was the machinery producing them. Mass production, endless consumption and a fashion system she felt had become increasingly detached from artistry pushed her back towards something she already understood: thrifting.

There, clothes could retain evidence of another life. Helena imagines the people who wore them before her: a necklace held nervously because somebody special once gave it to its owner, or a garment carrying a history she can never completely know. Rather than diminish an object, that previous existence makes it more interesting. “I find far more meaning and beauty in something that already has that essence,” she explains.

Her approach is less about accumulating vintage trophies than extending their lives. She barely buys new clothes, sometimes only one or two pieces a year, and is quick to point out that thrifting loses its purpose when it becomes another excuse for overconsumption. The thrill is in finding the thing that genuinely speaks to you, then folding it into your own world.

Perhaps that insistence on making things personal is also why the label influencer began to feel increasingly strange. For years, fashion and social media had made Helena legible through a series of familiar titles: influencer, fashionista, model. Yet the more disciplines she moved between — styling, modelling, painting, collage, creative direction — the narrower those definitions seemed.

Her solution was not to find a more precise box, but a much larger one.“And so my way of taking myself out of that is putting a different name on myself — artist.”

To Helena, the distinction matters because influencing implies a predetermined direction. “You could look online and have the steps on how to become an influencer,” she says. “An artist does not have a step-by-step guide on how to become one. And I prefer it that way. I prefer that I make my own steps.”

Those steps can lead almost anywhere. She has modelled since she was 15, worked in front of and behind the camera, drawn, styled, experimented with hair and makeup and increasingly understood those practices not as competing careers but as different entrances into the same brain. “I take it as my sole purpose in life to show people that told me that you have to focus on one thing to succeed [that I can] genuinely focus on everything.”

Personal style, in Helena’s world, works in much the same way. It is less about assembling the correct references, mimicking other styles, chasing trends. Instead, what guides her is a personal curiosity. An outfit can contain an Egyptian television memory, something her father taught her in a Port Said market, a colour associated with a particular feeling and a secondhand object whose previous owner she will never meet.

“If you wake up and look at something new every day — a bird comes by, a tree is changing colours — that’s your own perspective about things,” Helena says. “And it’s the same with fashion.”

Maybe that is the real trick behind the treasures she seems able to find before everyone else at the vintage markets. Helena is not necessarily looking at different things. She has simply trained herself to look differently.

In this week’s Scene Selects, Helena breaks down 3 looks in her signature curious, crazy, and maximalist style inspired by her cats. As she puts it, "I don’t do much planning for my process of getting ready. Sometimes it’s based on one item in my closet, and other times I have a makeup look on, and I wanna match the vibes. For today, I couldn’t help but think about my babies (cats) and I found pieces that attracted me to them.“

LOOK ONE: MIDNIGHTPrada Heels

Handmade Upcycled Earrings by Helena

Roberto Cavalli Top

Thrifted Skirt from Paris

Georgian Bag

LOOK TWO: IZUKUThrifted Heels Georgia

Chloe Vintage Bag

Up-cycled Necklace made by Helena

Isabel Marant Top

Domrebel Denim Pants

LOOK THREE: TODOROKIPuma Ballerinas

Thrifted Pants

Thrifted Tie

Thrifted Shirt

Thrifted Belt

Bottega Vintage Bag

Up-cycle Earrings made by Helena