Available from April 21. It debuts with an installation at Milan Design Week: an eighteenth-century German carousel, where the horses have yielded to giant fruit and vegetables. Creative direction by Ella Soccorsi for Arket.
It was only to be expected. Laila Gohar, the artist who made sculptural banquets her language for Prada, Hermès, Comme des Garçons, and Simone Rocha, was bound one day to move into clothing. She has now done so. For Spring/Summer 2026, the Swedish label Arket entrusts her with a collection of 27 pieces, her first foray into ready-to-wear, and everything that makes her singular is there: a grammar of ordinary beauty, a taste for slow craftsmanship, a certain poetic cheek.
Born in Cairo and based in New York, Gohar has always refused the line between the everyday and the exceptional. She cooks in her finest clothes, hosts in her finest clothes, lives in them. That philosophy runs through every piece. The collection is built around oppositions: masculine and feminine, supple and rigid, opaque and transparent. It includes a white embroidered canvas set with workwear accents, a jersey henley, a smocked blouse borrowed from women's work uniforms, a tie-front apron blouse, a bralette, and an ecru silk-organza skirt. The centerpiece: an almost sculptural modular dress in crisp cotton lifted with silk inserts, whose skirt comes off. The accessories, crochet, hand-embroidered beads, irregular monograms, speak to Gohar's attachment to textile traditions.
