Jordan has a fashion industry: so why can’t we see it?

Try to find out what fashion is worth to Jordan.

Not garments. Fashion. The designers, the studios, the stylists, the people whose names are on the label. Try to find the number a journalist would put in a headline, or a minister would say in a speech, or a designer would type into a grant application.

It isn’t there.

It isn’t out of date. It isn’t behind a paywall. It isn’t buried in a PDF nobody uploaded. It has never been produced, because nobody has been asked to produce it.

What you find instead is a different industry.

The number that does exist

Jordan has a very large clothing number. More than 1,000 establishments. Around 96,000 jobs. Exports of over $2.4 billion a year, roughly $2.2 billion of it going to the United States. The sector is 7.7 per cent of manufacturing GDP and just under 20 per cent of everything Jordan sells abroad.

This is one of the most carefully counted industries in the country. It is also not a fashion industry.

Almost all of it is contract manufacturing inside Qualifying Industrial Zones, set up in 1996 to make clothes for foreign brands. In the factories exporting to the US, around three quarters of the workers are migrants, mostly from South and South-East Asia. Roughly three quarters of the workforce overall is women. No Jordanian designer’s name is attached to any of it. Nothing made there was designed here.

So Jordan can tell you exactly how many T-shirts it ships. It cannot tell you anything about the people who design clothes.

What fashion design is worth: 0.7 per cent of “Others”

In 2022, two economists - Serena Sandri at the German Jordanian University and Nooh Alshyab at Yarmouk University - published what they described as the first attempt to quantify the output and employment contribution of Jordan’s creative economy. They wrote plainly that the country had “neither an official definition of the sector, nor any comprehensive mapping.” So they built one themselves, out of raw industrial classification data.

Their finding: in 2018, the creative economy was 2.4% of GDP and employed 3% of the workforce.

Then they broke it down by output. Architecture and engineering, 32%. Publishing, 22%. Software and games, 18%. Crafts, 11%. Radio and television, 7%. Advertising, around 4%. Film and video, around 3%. Art and antiques, around 2%.

And then a leftover box, called “Others.” Inside it: design, fashion design and photography. All three together, in 2018 - 0.7%.

That is the most precise figure anyone has ever produced for Jordanian fashion design. Not fashion design on its own. Fashion design sharing a fraction of one per cent with two other disciplines, inside a category for things too small to name on the chart.

The same study also measures employment and economic output across Jordan’s creative industries. Design and photography are grouped together: they account for 4% of the creative workforce, but just 0.7% of its economic value. The authors themselves note that this figure is lower than they expected, especially given the number of national and international initiatives supporting design in Jordan and the stronger results found in similar studies elsewhere.

The problem is not that fashion cannot be counted separately. In the study’s own methodology, fashion design and photography are assigned different classification codes. The data system distinguishes between them. The published results do not. Fashion is grouped into a broader category, making it impossible to see what share belongs to fashion alone.

Why a number is not vanity

A number is a tool you use to ask for things.

In 2023, the UK Fashion and Textile Association paid Oxford Economics to measure British fashion. The answer came back at £62 billion of GDP, 1.3 million jobs and more than £23 billion in tax. That figure now turns up in House of Commons briefings. When the industry wants something from government, it opens with it.

Germany did the same. Fashion Council Germany commissioned the same firm and got around €70 billion and roughly 1 million jobs. The research also documented the losses - value added had fallen 12%, and employment 20% since 2019. You can only prove a sector is in decline if somebody has measured where it started.

Jordan cannot make either argument because the baseline data does not exist.

Nobody is writing it down

Numbers come from records, and records come from people whose job is to write things down.

Vogue Arabia launched online in October 2016 and in print in 2017, with its editorial operation based in Dubai. Jordan has never had a dedicated bureau or newsroom of its own. Coverage of the country has therefore been produced from a regional distance, without a permanent editorial presence embedded in Jordan’s fashion scene.

Jordan’s own magazines - Living Well, Layalina and others - are lifestyle and society titles. They cover parties, beauty and celebrities. No Jordanian outlet has a fashion desk or a named fashion critic.

At Jordan Fashion Week, around March 2019, designer Ayesha Dabbas told the magazine eniGma that she had hoped to meet buyers and get press, but that “most of the attention was given to well-known names.” The same review counted two regional buyers for more than thirty designers.

The archive already exists

The obvious hope is that even if nobody covers the present, somebody must be keeping the past.

Somebody is. In Amman.

Tiraz, the Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, holds more than 2,000 costumes and weavings - the fullest collection of Jordanian, Palestinian, and other Arab dress anywhere in the world. It was not built by a ministry. It was gathered over roughly fifty years by one woman, Widad Kawar, as a private collection, and only later became an institution. It opens three days a week.

So the archive is not missing. It is simply not connected to anything. It is not built into a curriculum, not cited by a statistics office, not referenced by the industry press, because there is no industry press to reference it.

That pattern repeats across the region. Lebanese Fashion History was started in March 2021 by one designer, Joe Challita, as an Instagram account; it now has around 73.6K followers as of August 2026. The Syrian Design Archive was founded in 2020 by three designers - Kinda Ghannoum, Sally Alassafen and Hala Al Afsaa - because Syrian design history had never been formally recorded anywhere. The Arabic Cover Design Archive was started by one designer in Egypt.

Not one of them is an institution. Every one of them is a person who decided to start writing things down.

Nobody is judging it

An archive tells you what happened. It does not tell you whether any of it was good.

Fashion criticism is rare everywhere now, and the reason is money. Fashion media is largely paid for by fashion brands, and the seat at the show can always be taken away.

The clearest example is from 2012. Cathy Horyn, then chief fashion critic at the New York Times, was not invited to Hedi Slimane’s first show for Saint Laurent. She reviewed it from photographs anyway and was unimpressed. Slimane answered publicly that she would never get a seat at his shows. Armani had already banned her.

That is a critic at the most powerful newspaper in the world. Now think about the position of a critic in a scene where everyone knows everyone.

A scene without critics only ever receives press releases. Criticism is what turns a scene into an industry with standards.

And none of it is findable

This is not a reach problem.

At the end of 2025, Jordan had 10.6 million internet users - 92.5% of the population. There were 6.8 million social media accounts and 4.55 million people on Instagram.

The audience is already built and the distribution is free. The failure is that nothing is being documented in one place. There is nowhere a student, a buyer or a journalist can go to find out what has happened in Jordanian fashion, who is working now, or what anyone thought about any of it. The material exists in pieces - a post here, a photograph there, an event that happened and then disappeared.

“But isn’t this a funding problem?”

The fair objection is that this is about money, not media. Give designers capital, factories and showrooms, and coverage will follow.

Funding is a real barrier. Designers say so themselves.

But the order runs the other way. Buyers, investors, grant committees and ministries fund what they can see and assess. And there is no way to build a policy case for a sector that your own government’s numbers cannot describe.

There is genuine work happening, and more of it than the silence suggests. Jordan’s Economic Modernisation Vision names garments a priority sector. A UNIDO programme funded by Italy has run a fashion design competition in Amman. More than 10 institutions teach garment and leather skills. Jordan Fashion Week exists. The support structures are real. What none of them produce is a record: a figure a ministry could cite, an archive a student could search, a critic anyone would argue with. You can fund a sector for a decade and still not be able to describe it.

Press is not decoration on top of an industry. It is part of what makes an industry visible, measurable and easier to support.

The record exists. It is kept somewhere else.

Zeid Hijazi was born in Amman in 1998, studied at Central Saint Martins, and won the first Franca Sozzani Debut Talent Award at Fashion Trust Arabia in 2020. He works between London and Amman.

Batoul al-Rashdan of Studio B.O.R. is based in Jordan and won the first Fashion Tech award at Fashion Trust Arabia in 2024. She collected it in Marrakesh.

Amina Muaddi was born to a Jordanian father and spent part of her childhood in Amman. Her shoes were the second most-searched women’s product on the fashion platform Lyst in the last quarter of 2019. Her company is in Paris. Her shoes are made in Italy.

Every one of these people has been judged, funded, photographed and written about. Jordanian fashion is documented. It is documented in Doha, in Marrakesh, in Paris and in London - held in other people’s records, filed under other countries’ line items, counted towards other countries’ numbers.

Most of the building has already been done. The writing down hasn’t.