RABWA

Weddings are moving into Jordan's cultural sites

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A wedding photograph rarely remains within the wedding.

It moves from the couple’s account to their guests, from the photographer to the planner, and from there to wedding publications, mood boards and the feeds of people who may never have considered Jordan before. The couple is the subject of the image. The location is often what makes someone stop.

Recently, an engagement took place inside the Umayyad Palace at the Amman Citadel. A couple held their pre-wedding celebration beneath the columns of the Temple of Artemis in Jerash. Weddings appeared among the stone arches of Qasr Al-Mshatta and within the Nabataean landscape of Little Petra.

Different couples, different celebrations. Together, they are the clearest public result of a sector that Jordan’s tourism institutions have been quietly developing for at least two years, and they are arriving precisely when Jordan needs them most.

The timing is not incidental

According to the Central Bank of Jordan, international arrivals to Jordan fell 5% to 2.01 million in the first four months of 2026. Tourism revenues fell harder: $2.17 billion, down 10.4% on the same period in 2025. April alone was down 27.2%. The decline ran across every source market, with American visitors down 17.1%.

Jordan’s visitor economy is unusually exposed to how the region looks from the outside. The country can be entirely calm and still lose a season to headlines written about its neighbours.

That exposure is why the type of tourism Jordan attracts matters just as much as visitor numbers. Roughly 85% of international visitors come for culture and heritage, according to the National Tourism Strategy 2021-2025. This model depends on large numbers of visitors who spend relatively little, peaks during certain seasons and is often the first to suffer when the region feels uncertain.

A destination wedding behaves almost nothing like it. That difference is the argument. Jordan doesn’t need more visitors. It needs visitors who are worth more.

What one wedding brings

According to The Knot, 83% of couples who plan a destination wedding say their guests must travel or stay overnight, and guests who fly spend an average of $1,680 each. The couple themselves spend an average of $41,000 on an international destination wedding.

For a wedding of sixty guests flying in, that could mean around $100,000 on travel and accommodation alone. Add the couple’s wedding budget, and a single celebration could bring well over $140,000 into the wider tourism and events economy.

More importantly, that money lands differently. A packaged tour distributes value to airlines, hotels and operators. A site-led wedding distributes it to florists, set designers, photographers, caterers, fashion designers and make-up artists - that is, to skilled creative labour, most of it Jordanian, much of it freelance, and a significant share of it women.

And there is the calendar. Jordan’s heritage tourism is seasonal by nature. Weddings run on a different clock - Four Seasons Amman reports its strongest demand from couples in the Gulf and India booking June through September, traditionally the quietest period for cultural tourism. Wedding demand fills the months when tourism slows down.

This is already a sector, not a trend

The strongest evidence that this is an economic proposition rather than an aesthetic one is that the institutions moved first.

In October 2025, Aqaba hosted the 11th Destination Wedding Planners Congress - the industry’s largest B2B gathering, bringing more than 500 planners from over 70 countries. It was brought to Jordan by the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority in partnership with the Jordan Tourism Board, and it placed Jordan on a host list that includes Athens, Florence, Bali, and Dubai. The Jordan Tourism Board’s Managing Director, Dr Abdulrazzaq Arabiyat, put it plainly: “Wedding tourism is one of the key sectors supporting the tourism industry and the national economy.”

Then the hospitality industry made it bookable. In 2025, Four Seasons Hotel Amman began selling fully coordinated weddings staged away from the hotel at two archaeological locations: the Amman Citadel, and the South Theatre at Jerash. Not a hotel ballroom overlooking these sites, but within the sites themselves.

When a global luxury hotel begins offering a Roman theatre as a ceremony venue, complete with catering, lighting and production, the heritage site is no longer simply a setting chosen by an individual couple. It has become part of Jordan’s luxury wedding market.

Why the images work harder than a campaign

Conventional destination marketing presents archaeological sites as empty landscapes. The Treasury without visitors. Wadi Rum without movement. Jerash silent beneath the sun. Those images do not tell you what it would feel like to be there, and they feel more like advertisements than lived experiences.

Wedding images do something a tourism board cannot do for itself. They give the landscape an emotional function, and they do it through someone else’s story.

Petra becomes somewhere to make a promise. Jerash becomes somewhere to gather. The Citadel becomes part of a family’s story - at Farah Hanandeh’s engagement, the family described choosing the Umayyad Palace deliberately, to show that “local is more beautiful” and that Jordan has archaeological sites it can proudly present to the world. Little Petra becomes the place where two cultures begin a shared life, as it did this month for Lila Refai and Guilherme Dzik, whose wedding was described as bringing two worlds together beneath the Petra landscape.

The site stops being observed. It participates.

That matters because of how destination choices are now made. Expedia’s 2026 research, surveying 24,000 adults across 18 countries, found that 81% of Gen Z and millennial travellers plan trips around locations they have seen on screen. Screen content and social content are not identical, but they work on the same mechanism: a place enters the imagination through a story someone else was telling, and it stays there. No campaign pays for that reach, and it returns every anniversary.

Fashion understood this before tourism did. When Dior staged a men’s show at the Pyramids of Giza in December 2022, Egypt’s former vice-minister of tourism, Adla Ragab, described the return in exactly these terms: “free publicity with all the influencers and bloggers,” with an impact “like a snowball effect where people will start talking about everywhere.”

Notably, she could not point to a number.

No carousel, however widely shared, can be credited with an increase in visitor numbers. The data required to prove it - search interest, booking origin and enquiry attribution, tracked against publication - is not collected in Jordan, and the Egyptian example shows that even a globally covered event leaves officials describing impact rather than measuring it.

What these images create comes before the booking itself; awareness, imagination, desire. Before anyone books a destination, they have to be able to picture themselves in it.

Jordan’s fashion industry doesn’t have a funding problem.

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Alexander McQueen shows in London today. So does Mulberry, with Christopher Kane’s first collection as creative director. McQueen and Kane entered the industry through the same door. Both were selected for NEWGEN, the British Fashion Council scheme designed to support emerging talent. At the time, neither name carried the weight it does today.

The scheme

NEWGEN was founded in 1993. Each year, it selects a small group of emerging designers, provides funding for them to show at London Fashion Week and presents their collections in a Paris showroom, where international buyers can discover their work and place orders.

This season, it is supporting sixteen designers, including three newcomers: Francesca Lake, Gui Rosa and Petra Fagerström, each showing in London for the first time. More than two hundred designers have passed through the programme since it began. Erdem. Simone Rocha. Mary Katrantzou. Matthew Williamson. Alexander McQueen. Christopher Kane.

It is usually described as a funding scheme. But the funding is only part of what it provides.

The recognition comes first

In January 2025, the British Fashion Council secured £1 million from the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The funding would support show spaces, presentation costs and mentoring for early-stage designers. It arrived thirty-two years after NEWGEN began.

By then, the programme had already spent three decades doing something far cheaper and considerably more important: publishing a list. It still does. Every year, a small group of designers is named, announced and presented to the industry as a generation of talent worth paying attention to.

The list directs buyers towards emerging designers, introduces their work to editors and identifies where institutional support could have the greatest impact.

Visibility does not replace funding. It builds the foundation for it. Money can only be distributed once the sector has been clearly defined. That means knowing who belongs to it, what they are building and where support is needed. A sector cannot be properly funded if it has never been identified, documented or written down.

This matters in Jordan, where the lack of funding is often treated as the first problem. But before an industry can ask for investment, it has to become visible as an industry. Its designers must be named. Its work must be recorded. Its needs must be made specific. Otherwise, talent remains a collection of individuals, not a sector that institutions can recognise and fund.

The list does not simply record support. The act of naming designers is itself a form of support. And Jordan does not need millions in funding to begin doing the same.

How many are there?

Ask how many people design fashion in Jordan. Not who. How many.

There is no reliable answer. No publicly available figure. No regularly maintained record. We do not know because, as far as any public evidence shows, nobody has ever counted.

You have probably already answered the question in your head, and the answer was not many. It feels like the obvious answer, but there is no reliable evidence to support it. Public understanding of the industry is based almost entirely on the designers who have already gained visibility. As a result, Jordanian fashion appears only as large as its most visible names. That reflects how well the industry has been documented, not how many people are actually working within it.

This assumption has consequences. If Jordan’s fashion industry is believed to be too small, it becomes easier to dismiss the need for funding, international delegations or dedicated platforms. Yet that belief continues to shape decisions despite the absence of reliable evidence to support it.

There have been occasional attempts to document Jordanian creative talent, but none provides a clear picture of the country’s fashion industry. In October 2017, Dezeen published a feature on ten emerging Jordanian designers following Amman Design Week. The selection included graphic, product and architectural designers, but only one fashion designer. Emirates Woman later published a feature on five Jordanian fashion designers worth knowing. Both offered visibility at a particular moment, but neither was intended to function as a complete or regularly updated record of the industry. The lists that exist were created as editorial features, not as an ongoing record of Jordan’s fashion industry.

These are records of a single moment, produced from outside Jordan and never developed into ongoing documentation. They remain separate editorial features and have never become part of a continuously maintained industry record. The 2017 selection was not revisited the following year, and the designers it named were not tracked over time. It therefore tells us little about the size of the industry then, its size now or how it has evolved in between.

So the naming of Jordanian designers is currently being done occasionally, by foreign magazines, as a feature rather than as a record. Jordan does not yet author a consistent account of its own fashion industry.

This matters because almost everything we might want for Jordanian fashion depends on that knowledge. Buyers cannot approach designers they cannot find. A grant programme cannot build a meaningful shortlist without knowing who is eligible. A delegation cannot represent an industry whose participants remain unidentified. A journalist covering the region relies on whatever list is available, even when it is outdated and was never intended to serve as a record of Jordanian fashion. An opportunity may technically be open to Jordanian designers, but access begins with knowing who they are and how to reach them.

There is also a question of who gets counted. If recognition requires a runway show or magazine feature, the number will inevitably appear small. Include independent labels, ateliers, pattern cutters, embroiderers and design graduates whose careers are never tracked, and the picture changes. But without a proper record, nobody knows by how much.

We do not have a funding problem. We have a record problem. Until we know who is here, what they do and what they need, we cannot understand the scale of the industry we are asking others to support. A record does not solve the funding problem. It tells us what, exactly, needs to be funded and how large it really is.

What a register is

It is not a prize. It is not a ranking, and it does not decide who is good.

A register is a published, dated, and continuously maintained record of who is designing here. It documents their names, what they make, when they began, where to find them and what they have shown. It gets updated. It carries the date it was last checked. Anyone can read it and anyone can be added to it.

That is the entire idea. Information is recorded, checked and updated.

It would also produce something Jordan currently lacks, which is a reliable number. Not an impression or a guess shared in conversation, but a figure with a date and a clear method behind it. The number may be small. It may be considerably larger than assumed. Either result would tell us more than the uncertainty we currently rely on.

That number could then be questioned, revised and compared over time. For the first time, the conversation would begin with evidence.

A register does not grant anyone the title of designer. Nor does it decide whose work matters. It records the people who meet a clear, published set of criteria and gives others the opportunity to submit themselves for inclusion.

The difficult part is continuing

In September 2016, a workshop ran at the Jordan Museum’s MakerSpace as part of Amman Design Week, described as an attempt to establish the groundwork for an association of designers in Jordan. People sat in a room and did the work. Ten years later, it is difficult to find any public record of what followed.

That is not an accusation. Continuity is the hardest thing to sustain here, and Amman Design Week itself is returning this October after a six-year absence, which tells you something about how much effort it takes to simply keep going. But it does establish the shape of the problem. Jordan does not lack initiative. It lacks the boring, unglamorous repetition that turns an initiative into an institution.

A register that cannot be found or updated cannot function as a register.

When NEWGEN began in 1993, it did not have three decades of alumni or evidence of its future influence. Its credibility grew because the programme continued. New designers were selected, their names were published and the process was repeated the following year. Over time, that repetition became a record. Authority did not appear fully formed at the beginning. Trust accumulated through consistency.

The first step towards supporting an industry is knowing who it contains.

410 below: Imagining a Luxury Campaign in Wadi Mujib

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Campaigns Nobody Commissioned is a RABWA series. We take a Jordanian location that has never been the subject of a fashion campaign and build the campaign it deserves, then explain why it matters. All imagery in this series is AI-generated concept work. None of it was shot on location.

The place

Wadi Mujib runs through the mountains east of the Dead Sea, meeting it 410 metres below sea level. Part of it is protected as the Mujib Biosphere Reserve, often described as the lowest nature reserve on Earth. Its high stone walls shift between shades of red, orange, brown and soft pink. Cold, fast-moving water flows through it throughout the year. At its narrowest points, the walls move so close together that only a small glimpse of sky can be seen above.

Most people know Wadi Mujib as an adventure destination - a place where visitors walk through water, swim, climb and inevitably get soaked. It regularly appears in travel guides and holiday photographs. But it has rarely been presented as an image in its own right: a setting with a visual identity powerful enough to define an entire campaign.

410 BELOW sees Wadi Mujib differently.

Why red

We started with one rule: nothing should compete with the stone.

That ruled out print, pattern and styling tricks. The canyon already does the talking, so the clothing had to answer it rather than interrupt it. We chose one colour and one silhouette: a long red gown in sheer, heavy-moving fabric, with a train that the water could take hold of.

Red works here for a practical reason. The rock has warm but muted tones, while the saturated red stands clearly apart from it. Against the grey-green of the river, the colour becomes even more striking. Every frame is built around that contrast between the red, the stone and the water.

There is also a quieter reason. Water changes fabric. Dry chiffon is light and decorative. Wet chiffon clings, darkens and pulls. We wanted the gown to look as though it had been in the river for hours, as if it belonged to the place rather than being brought in for a day.

The campaign

The imagined campaign moves through the canyon in five moments.

Arrival. The model stands waist-deep in the river, facing the camera, walls rising on either side. It is a direct, almost confrontational frame. This is the establishing image, the one that says this is where we are.

Movement. She moves through the water as the current drags the train behind her. The fabric does what no stylist could arrange: it spreads, catches and pulls back.

Close.The camera moves closer: wet hair, skin, fabric clinging to the shoulder and sandstone behind her. This is the beauty frame - the kind of image a fragrance or jewellery house would recognise.

Below the surface. Half above water and half below, eyes closed, the gown moving around her with the current. It is the most surreal image in the series and reveals a quieter, more dreamlike side of the campaign.

Departure. She looks back over her shoulder, then she is further away, low in a still pool, with the red spreading out around her as if the river itself has changed colour.

The argument

Luxury fashion spends a great deal of money looking for landscapes that feel untouched: salt flats, glaciers, desert canyons in other countries. Brands do this because an extraordinary location does something a studio can’t. It gives the clothes a story before anyone reads a word.

Jordan has these landscapes, and Wadi Mujib is one of the strongest. It is dramatic without being a cliché. It isn’t Petra, and it isn’t Wadi Rum. Most of the world hasn’t seen it through a fashion lens at all, and that is exactly what makes it valuable.

So the point of 410 Below isn’t the gown. The point is that Jordan’s landscapes can carry a luxury campaign on their own, and they haven’t been asked to. The problem isn’t a lack of locations. It is that nobody has pictured them this way yet, so nobody has pitched them.

That is what this series is for: to picture them first.

If it were real

A campaign like this wouldn’t be a fantasy to produce, but the canyon would set the terms. The wet trails are seasonal, usually open from spring through October, and they close when the water runs high. The reserve is protected land, so any production would need to work lightly: a small crew, no lasting marks, and respect for the place that made the images possible. The water is real and the current is strong, so safety would shape every shot.

These constraints wouldn’t be obstacles. They would give the campaign its character.

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

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Creative opportunities open now: Jordan and the MENA region

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In Jordan

Mshatta.stl: Amman Design Week

PROGRAMME: Residency / workshop, heritage reconstruction

FOR: Open to design, architecture and research practices

FOCUS: 3D scanning, modelling, fabrication

RUNS: Two weeks in September, in English

DEADLINE: 25 August

Sukhtian Foundation Performing Arts Scholarship: Amman Institute of Performing Arts

PROGRAMME: Two-year professional acting

FOR: Ages 18+, fluent Arabic required, no previous experience needed

FUNDING: Two full scholarships

DEADLINE: 9 September

Across MENA

Fire Station: Qatar Museums

PROGRAMME: Nine-month artists intensive, March-November 2027

FOR: Emerging artists 18–35, any nationality

FUNDING: Fully funded

DEADLINE: 5 September

MENA Panorama: PhotoVogue

PROGRAMME: Open call, photography and moving image

FOR: Photographers, video and multimedia artists, 18+

FOCUS: Fashion, portrait, documentary, fine art, experimental

SUBMIT: Free, online via Picter

DEADLINE: 24 September

Production Awards: Culture Resource

PROGRAMME: Production funding for artists and writers

FOR: Artists and writers under 35, application in Arabic

FOCUS: Visual arts, literature, music, performing arts, cinema

FUNDING: Up to €8,500 visual arts, music, performing arts · €6,500 literature · €13,000 cinema

DEADLINE: 19 October, 16:00 Beirut

Before you apply

Deadlines, eligibility and programme details can change. Always check the official source for the full requirements and most current information before submitting an application.

What 80 Jordanians built in 72 hours

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Eighty young participants. Three days. One theme: Dreams.

Across Jordan Gaming Lab’s four branches, participants were given 72 hours to turn that prompt into a working game as part of the local edition of an Arab game-development challenge.

But what happened over those three days was not only programming.

72 hours. 1 theme.

Teams formed around programming, illustration, design, sound and story-writing. These are disciplines that rarely get discussed together when Jordan’s “creative scene” is being mapped.

That is partly what makes game development interesting. A finished game might depend on code, but it also requires a visual language, characters, environments, narrative decisions, music, sound and an understanding of how an audience interacts with all of it.

By the end of the challenge, the participants had produced 24 finished games.

24 games later…

The completed games were uploaded to itch.io, where participants could play and rate one another’s work. The competition does not stop at Jordan’s borders: local teams are being assessed alongside developers participating from across the Arab region.

That matters because it places emerging Jordanian developers within a regional creative network rather than treating game development as an isolated local hobby.

Beyond gaming.

Jordan Gaming Lab’s ambitions also extend beyond the competition itself. The lab is being developed around areas including artificial intelligence, IoT, VR and AR, robotics, digital production and game development.

The stated aim: preparing young Jordanians for the jobs that don’t exist here yet.

Someone still has to imagine the environment, construct the story, design the interface, create the sound and decide what the final experience feels like.

That is creative work.

This is a creative industry. It just doesn’t look like the ones we usually talk about.

Amman after dark

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jordanian fashion imagery has a familiar geography. When the country appears internationally, the camera often travels south: desert, rock, monumental landscapes.

Amman After Dark looks in the opposite direction.

This is the first entry in Campaigns Nobody Commissioned: a RABWA series imagining fashion campaigns for Jordanian locations that have rarely been treated as fashion locations at all. For 001, the campaign stays in the capital.

When the city changes

In daylight, Amman’s visual identity is dominated by stone. Buildings climb across the hills in variations of the same pale palette, creating the dense urban landscape the city is known for.

At night, that uniformity disappears.

Windows light up across the hills. Glass towers begin reflecting the city around them. Bridges become strips of light. Cars, signs, street lamps and shop fronts introduce colours that are almost absent during the day.

That version of Amman is rarely the version used to represent Jordan through fashion.

The Jordan Gate Towers rise behind the model, bringing one of Amman’s most recognisable modern landmarks into the campaign.

At the base of the Jordan Gate Towers, glass, reflection and the city at night become part of the styling.

Abdoun Bridge, reframed after dark as part of Amman’s fashion landscape.

Amman’s streets already contain the visual material a campaign needs: polished new development, worn stone, neighbourhood shopfronts, traffic, taxis, neon and architecture built across different decades.

The contrast is what makes the city useful. It does not offer one perfectly controlled visual identity - and it shouldn’t. Moving through Amman means moving between those different versions of the city, sometimes within minutes.

A quieter moment on Rainbow Street, where Amman’s nightlife becomes the setting.

A Jordanian taxi, busy streets and hanging lights.

Arabic neon cuts through the darkness, bringing Amman’s street-level identity into the image.

Wakalat Street after dark, reimagined as part of the campaign.

Not just a backdrop

The idea behind the campaign was not simply to place a model in Amman and photograph her.

The city needed to be visible in the image.

The towers, roads, bridges and older streets become part of the styling. One image feels polished and metropolitan; another is darker and more intimate. Together they suggest that a single city can offer several visual identities without leaving its boundaries.

What if Amman wasn’t just the backdrop, but part of the campaign?

What's been happening in the Jordanian creative scene

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Jordan’s creative scene does not always announce its progress in one major moment. More often, it appears through smaller signals: a designer receiving regional coverage, a new showcase opening, or hundreds of students putting themselves forward for a design programme.

Here are several developments we’ve been watching.

Jordanian names are travelling

Jordanian creatives are appearing within regional fashion conversations.

MOJEH’s designer directory named Zeid Hijazi among seven Middle Eastern designers to watch, while Villa 88 highlighted four Jordanian names: Laith Maalouf, Nafsika Skourti, Sara Mansour and Eman Al Ahmed.

Taken individually, these are editorial mentions. Collectively, they matter because regional visibility can introduce Jordanian work to audiences, buyers, editors and collaborators who may not otherwise encounter it.

The next generation is already building

Amman Design Week’s 2026 mentorship programme received 203 applications from more than 88 universities, institutions and high schools across Jordan, eventually selecting 37 projects by 47 students.

The numbers are worth paying attention to. They suggest young people in Jordan want to participate in design and creative practice. There is already demand.

What’s been happening on the ground

Design Space Amman hosted Local by Design, a two-day showcase in August.

Events like these create something online visibility cannot fully replace: a place for people working within the same ecosystem to encounter one another’s work in person.

For RABWA, these are exactly the developments worth continuing to follow.

Why does every fashion image of Jordan look the same?

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Search for fashion imagery made in Jordan and a pattern appears quickly.

Petra. Wadi Rum. The Dead Sea.

There is an obvious reason they appear so often: they are extraordinary places. The problem isn’t that fashion shoots there. The problem is what happens when three locations begin to stand in for the visual identity of an entire country.

Jordan has other landscapes, architecture and urban environments that could produce completely different fashion images. Here are five places we would start.

01 - Amman, after dark

By day, Amman’s pale stone creates an almost monochromatic cityscape. After sunset, that changes completely: towers, glass, headlights, illuminated streets and pockets of neon emerge across the hills.

Fashion could use that contrast. Instead of asking Amman to imitate another city’s version of nightlife, a campaign could lean into the density and irregularity that already make the capital recognisable.

Amman's night skyline offers a very different image of Jordan.

02 - Wadi Mujib

Wadi Mujib offers almost the opposite visual language: narrow red-rock walls, moving water and a landscape that forces the subject physically into the environment.

The lowest nature reserve in the world; 410 metres below sea level, 90km south of Amman.

It is generally approached as somewhere to hike through. Through a fashion lens, those same characteristics become texture, movement and scale. Water against fabric. A silhouette against rock. Clothing moving through the canyon rather than simply posing in front of it.

Wadi Mujib: usually the hike, rarely the fashion image.

03 - The Hijaz Railway

Old tracks, stations, trains and open desert make the Hijaz Railway an unusually complete visual world.

Built by the Ottomans, it reached Medina in 1908, running all the way down from Damascus.

It has history without relying on Jordan’s most familiar archaeological imagery. The industrial shapes of the railway against an open landscape could give a campaign something harder, more graphic and less expected.

The Hijaz Railway offers an industrial alternative to Jordan's familiar desert imagery.

04 - Umm Qais

A Roman city in black stone, still standing on a hill 378 metres up, overlooking Lake Tiberias and the Golan Heights.

From one spot you can see three countries: Jordan, Palestine and Syria.

It challenges the warm sandstone palette that dominates so much international imagery of the country. A fashion story here could be cooler, darker and more architectural - without losing any sense of place.

Black stone, ruins and an expansive northern landscape at Umm Qais.

05 - Hammamat Ma’in

Steam. Waterfalls. Mineral rock. Greenery.

264 metres below sea level. A waterfall over 20 metres, and the water comes out at 63 degrees.

These are not necessarily the images people outside Jordan associate with the country - which is precisely the point.

Hammamat Ma’in could produce something humid, dramatic and almost otherworldly. A campaign here would immediately complicate the persistent visual perception of Jordan as nothing but dry desert.

Hammamat Ma'in complicates the idea of Jordan as a purely desert landscape.

The answer isn’t to stop shooting Petra, Wadi Rum or the Dead Sea.

It is to stop acting as though the visual story ends there.

A stronger fashion image of Jordan would be one that allows the country to look urban, industrial, wet, green, dark, contemporary, historic and occasionally unexpected.

There are more campaigns here than the ones we have already seen.

Fashion week in Petra

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every fashion week builds a world that exists for a few days. Sets go up, invitations go out, runways are constructed and, almost as quickly, everything disappears.

Jordan already has something considerably harder to build.

Petra has scale, history and a sense of arrival that no temporary fashion-week venue could replicate. The idea of staging fashion here sounds impossible until you start looking at what would actually be required. The setting exists. The audience could exist. The designers certainly exist. What is missing is the decision to put those things together. That is the starting point for this concept.

The venue already exists

There is something inherently theatrical about arriving at Petra. You do not simply walk up to the Treasury. You move through the Siq first: a narrow corridor of stone that controls what you see, how quickly you see it and, eventually, the moment the façade appears.

Fashion productions spend enormous amounts of time engineering that kind of entrance. Here, it has existed for centuries. Rather than building a conventional runway inside Petra, the proposition would be to work with the route that is already there - allowing the location itself to dictate the rhythm of the show.

The Siq reimagined as the entrance to a speculative Fashion Week in Petra.

The destination would be as important as the entrance. At night, the Treasury would require very little intervention. The architecture becomes the set; warm ground lighting traces the route rather than competing with it.

The point is not to transform Petra into something unrecognisable. It is almost the opposite. The strongest version of the idea would require as little as possible. The venue is already doing most of the work.

The venue is already running. No one ever thought to call it a runway.

A runway imagined in front of Al-Khazneh, with the site itself becoming the set.

The precedent is already there

Fashion has repeatedly moved beyond the traditional runway. Historic sites, monumental architecture and culturally significant settings have become part of how major fashion moments are staged and remembered.

That is why Petra does not feel as disconnected from fashion as it first sounds. The question is less whether a landmark can host fashion and more about what the event would say, who it would centre and how the site would be treated.

Fendi walked the Great Wall. Dior showed at the Pyramids.

Jordanian designers first

But the location alone would not make this interesting.

For a Fashion Week in Petra to mean anything beyond spectacle, Jordanian designers would have to sit at its centre. The proposal is simple: Jordanian designers open; international houses close. In that order, on purpose.

That distinction matters. An international house arriving in Petra would undoubtedly generate attention. But the more interesting question is whether that attention could be used to direct an international audience towards the designers already working here.

Front row, Petra. A speculative audience scene for RABWA's Fashion Week in Petra concept.

The only thing missing

There are obviously questions that a real event would have to answer - preservation, access, production, infrastructure and the responsibility that comes with using a site of this significance.

This isn’t a proposal pretending those questions do not exist. It is an exercise in asking what Jordan could imagine if ambitious ideas were taken seriously enough to be discussed in the first place.

The site exists. The lighting exists. The designers exist.

Only the decision doesn’t.