Iris Sustainable Clothing Dubai:
Creativity and Sustainability at a Young Age
Article published in Khaleej Times and other major dailies in the United Arab Emirates.
Creativity can take flight at any age, and wisdom is not just limited to the world-weary. It has been best demonstrated by two teenaged boys from Dubai who have fashionably barged into the business world with a green leaf and fresh approach. Mohammad Sani Ali and Ismail Dajani have quite literally extended an olive branch to the fashion industry with their homegrown men’s fashion brand - Iris. At the heart of their design sensibilities sits sustainability.
In the fashion world where trends change every season, unfortunately the clothes have a shorter lifespan, ending up at landfills for many unfortunate seasons. Environmentally-conscious
Mohammad Sani Ali is on a quest to give a fresh lease of life to the fashion industry by using surplus materials to make garments that support the environment while making a style statement.
The central practice of their business model is upcycling and closed-loop production, wherein men’s clothing is created using waste or surplus materials. This promotes a circular economy, where the surplus material is collected from factories to construct a new garment, which would have been disposed of to a landfill, becoming an environmental hazard as well. Even the packaging for their men’s outfits has been created with a lot of consideration, using bio-degradable materials and organic hand tags.
They have created a new style by fusing casual streetwear and tailoring, showcasing bold designs and unique patterns on their awe-inspiring line of shirts. Casual tailoring is popular in Europe and Japan, and they want to re-create the same success for the local and international markets. They are certain that Dubai’s fashion sensibilities will get a makeover with their trendy menswear and sustainable practices.
As students at the American School of Dubai, Mohammad Sani Ali and Ismail Dajani are ushering a new wave of social entrepreneurship. Sani is influenced by his family’s generation-long involvement in fashion and textiles. He is putting into use his academics for a good cause, carrying lessons from the classroom to implementing them in the boardroom while Ismail is pursuing his interest for design.
A precarious age when most teens worry about the number of likes their posts are getting, Sani and Ismail are busy choosing sustainable fabrics, studying consumer consumption patterns, disrupting the retail and e-commerce ecosystem, raising capital, evaluating smarter textile and production processes, patching up different fabrics to create contrasting designs, and much more.
With Iris, they have taken a giant leap towards mindful clothing and a greener planet. It’s just a matter of time when they would be at the forefront of many more social initiatives, as they move from teenage to youth, and from social entrepreneurs to crusaders of environmental causes.