Sara El Emary Maps Five Stages of Womanhood at Cairo Design Week

At this year’s Cairo Design Week, Sara Elemary is presenting a five-part installation built around a single idea: personal change, tracked through clothing and self-image over time. The project, titled Five Skins of Becoming, pairs five mannequins dressed as emotional stages of womanhood with a parallel set of photographs in which Elemary places herself inside the same phases.

The stages move in sequence: rebellion, confusion, loss, awakening, peace. They are treated as abstract moods and follow the order of her own life.

“I’m not here in CDW as a fashion designer,” she says. “I’m here for the human journey. Self-development, but in a fashionable way.”The first stage, The Rebellious Child, reflects El Emary’s early relationship with appearance. She describes growing up under constant scrutiny. “I was always mocked,” she says. “My clothes, my hair, my style. I never fit in and that made me stubborn.”

The garment is constructed from a deconstructed shirt with rough surface texture. The accompanying photograph shows her squared to the camera, playful in a checkered wrapped around the waist shirt.

The second stage, The Misread Signs, marks a period of disorientation. “I thought everything was a message from the universe,” she says. “I followed it too far. I made radical decisions.” The look softens into chiffon. In the photograph beside it, her face is partly covered. “You can’t shape your entire life like that,” she adds.Loss enters through The Broken Mother. “After having children,” El Emary says, “a woman can disappear into responsibility.” This stage is translated into weighted garments with bags, caps, and heavy hems. “As mothers, we can’t stay broken,” she says. “We have to rebuild ourselves to raise children with identity and values.”

The Awakening Queen follows as a dramatic gradual reassertion. “Growth,” she says. “Slow growth in career, in motherhood, in everything.” The silhouette sharpens the look bold shoulders, leather, upright stance. A helmet reflects armour, this is a stage where she started to try what life is offering, even embarked on a skydiving journey. El Emary associates it with reclaiming physical and psychological space. “I wanted to fight,” she says.

The final stage, The Peaceful Soul, steps away from force. “My designs are simpler now,” she says. “But they still have edge.” The garments loosen slightly. The photographs no longer hide the face and the posture settles.The entire installation is presented in black and white. “I wanted the emotions to come forward without colour taking over,” she says. With colour removed, attention moves to texture, movement, and posture, the smallest physical shifts become visible.

The structure of the work runs in tandem. The mannequins hold each stage in stillness, the photographs confirm that each version has been lived.

El Emary is clear that this approach is not new to her work. “It was always there,” she says. “Now it’s exaggerated with my long-standing focus on confidence, movement and authenticity but today they appear less as design values and more as personal outcomes.”