Raiya Zaher
Collection
Bio
Raiya Zaher is a Lebanese-American designer based in New York City, exploring the relationship between structure, identity, and personal expression. Her work often engages with deep emotional themes, philosophy, and societal commentary, using clothing as a means to examine the human condition. Rooted in tailored garments and historical references, particularly uniforms, she reinterprets structure through a more personal and introspective lens. Creating pieces that emphasize control, durability, and form, balancing both precision and distortion to produce garments that feel both familiar and subtly unsettling.
A Gentle Suffocation, In a World I Cannot Escape
A Gentle Suffocation, In a World I Cannot Escape, is a collection that draws from and explores my lived experience navigating the world while feeling less than human. It explores loneliness not as absence, but as an active and persistent condition, one that shapes perception, distorts reality, and creates a sense of existing at a distance from the world. Through this, investigating hallucinatory states, where memory, imagination, and emotion collapse into one another, producing an internal landscape that feels both unsettling and familiar. Related to this is the idea of “human performance,” in which identity is understood as constructed, rehearsed, and repeated to function within societal expectations.
Influenced by uniforms, natural cycles, Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd, and Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, reflecting the tension between control and instability, structure and dissolution. Uniform becomes a symbol of imposed order, while repetition mirrors the cyclical nature of both the natural world and internal emotional states. Rather than seeking resolution, I seek to accept contradiction, recognizing the impossibility of escape while continuing to exist within it. Externalizing these internal conditions, giving form to the intangible and allowing loneliness to become visible, structured, and inhabitable.
Credits
Photography: Oliver Leone
Models: Miles Thompson & Nana Shi
Make up: Donavee Fujii