{ "article": { "title" : "Isis Dunya: Is living her best life", "author" : "Isis Dunya", "category" : "interviews", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/isis-dunya", "date" : "2025-09-08 10:10:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/isis-dunya-IMG_2855.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "EIP: How did you start your career in fashion? What inspired you to enter that field?DUNYA: I started my brand eight years ago, after a trip to Lebanon. I moved to Beirut and felt a strong need to create a brand that truly represents my community. I saw that fashion was full of cultural appropriation and driven by capitalism, and I wanted to create something that looked like me, felt like us, and brought us together.EIP: You made everything yourself, so every piece has your special touch, which is rare when it comes to fashion these days. Tell us about your process.DUNYA: When I started this brand, I didn’t have many resources at first, which actually became a blessing. It allowed me to handle everything myself and fully express my identity and way of thinking through each piece. I choose the fabrics, make the patterns, and do the fittings and adjustments. I also do the photography, artistic direction, casting, production — sometimes even the catering during shoots! Over the years, I’ve started collaborating with freelancers, but I still carry most of the workload myself. This way of working has given me real independence and freedom. Producing everything in my own studio, making it in Paris, and fighting against fast fashion is a daily battle, but it’s also a strong commitment that defines my brand.EIP: What’s the connection between sustainability and fashion for you?DUNYA: As an Arab woman, I’ve always been deeply affected by the vicious cycle we get trapped in as part of the so-called “global South.” We end up supporting fast fashion, even luxury fashion, without realizing that behind these brands, there’s often the same exploitation — usually of racialized and marginalized people. Whether it’s a cheap fast fashion piece or an expensive luxury item, it’s still built on the same system of overproduction and exploitation.It frustrates me to see how we become both victims of and active participants in this system instead of supporting our own designers or finding alternative ways of producing and consuming fashion. Especially for marginalized communities, fast fashion is often the only accessible option, which makes the problem even more complex.That’s why I created my brand: as a way to break this cycle, reclaim our power, and propose a more conscious, community- based approach to fashion.EIP: Where do you find inspiration?DUNYA: I’m of Turkish and Algerian origin, born and raised in Paris. As a child, I traveled to Algeria often, but during my teenage years, I had to stop going because of family reasons. That distance really shaped me. It pushed me to look deeper into anti-capitalist ideas, traditional clothing, and non-Western cultures.I’ve always felt different. Even in middle school, I had my own style; I wasn’t like everyone else. I was fascinated by how clothes can express someone’s singularity and personality. My inspiration comes from everywhere: Paris, my travels, and my neighborhoods. I live in the suburbs, in the 93 — the poorest department in Paris, often labeled as “no-go zones.” But for me, it’s home, and it’s full of life and beauty.The people the fashion world ignores are the ones who inspire me most: an aunt going to the market in her traditional robe, a family dressing up in matching outfits for Eid, an uncle going to the mosque with his cane and a pop culture T-shirt. I don’t care about runways, about “clean girl” aesthetics, or what’s trending on the Left Bank. I care about real people and real stories. That’s where my creativity truly lives.EIP: How does your Arab culture in Paris come to life in your work?DUNYA: My Arab culture is everywhere in my work. I love going to local markets in Montreuil or in my neighborhood, wearing a djellaba and feeling fully myself. What I love most is being able to show both sides of me: one night I can go to a fancy party in a mini skirt and heels, and the next day I’m in a djellaba and Nike TNs.My personality is built on these two worlds: being a “baddie” and being a girl from the hood. In France, there’s a real problem with how Arab women are seen. The term beurette, for example, is a very negative, fetishizing word that reduces Arab women to stereotypes. Through my work, I wanted to destroy these codes and show that we can be whoever we want to be.We can be glamorous, sexy, and modest all at once. We don’t have to fit into a box that society or the fashion world wants to put us in. For me, it’s about the freedom to be yourself without caring about the gaze of others.I also had to fight against patriarchy within my family to get the freedom I have today, and I’m proud of that fight. Through my clothes, I want my community to feel the same: come as you are, be what you want to be, and don’t let anyone define you.EIP: You have such wonderful energy. What words do you live by?DUNYA: I truly feel guided by a force since I started this brand. Even though it’s extremely hard to survive as an independent label, I know my work has a real purpose. When I see how women leave my studio — empowered, seen, and represented — I know why I do this.I created this brand so that racialized women, women who wear the veil, women with curves, and women who want to feel sexy can finally feel understood and included. No other brand has done what I do; deciding that each woman is different and that all deserve to be accepted and celebrated.Even after seven years, I have no regrets. My work is meaningful, and so many women see themselves in it. That’s what keeps me going every day. I’m deeply passionate, I aim high, and I know in ten years, I’ll be even further.Humility and honesty also guide me. My work is honest; I never compromise on my vision or my values. That’s what keeps me true to myself and to my community.EIP: If you could be the creative director of a fashion house, which one would it be and why?DUNYA: I would choose Jean Paul Gaultier. In the ‘90s, his approach was so punk and revolutionary — he put Black, Arab, and queer people on the runway at a time when no one else dared to. For me, he’s a designer who has always stayed close to the people.In terms of values and energy, it’s the house that resonates with me the most. It feels authentic, inclusive, and bold — just like what I try to express in my work." } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Dignity Before Stadiums:: Morocco’s Digital Uprising", "author" : "Cheb Gado", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/dignity-before-stadiums", "date" : "2025-10-02 09:08:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Cover_Morocco_GenZ.jpg", "excerpt" : "No one expected a generation raised on smartphones and TikTok clips to ignite a spark of protest shaking Morocco’s streets. But Gen Z, the children of the internet and speed, have stepped forward to write a new chapter in the history of uprisings, in their own style.The wave of anger began with everyday struggles that cut deep into young people’s lives: soaring prices, lack of social justice, and the silencing of their voices in politics. They didn’t need traditional leaders or party manifestos; the movement was born out of a single hashtag that spread like wildfire, transforming individual frustration into collective momentum.", "content" : "No one expected a generation raised on smartphones and TikTok clips to ignite a spark of protest shaking Morocco’s streets. But Gen Z, the children of the internet and speed, have stepped forward to write a new chapter in the history of uprisings, in their own style.The wave of anger began with everyday struggles that cut deep into young people’s lives: soaring prices, lack of social justice, and the silencing of their voices in politics. They didn’t need traditional leaders or party manifestos; the movement was born out of a single hashtag that spread like wildfire, transforming individual frustration into collective momentum.One of the sharpest contradictions fueling the protests was the billions poured into World Cup-related preparations, while ordinary citizens remained marginalized when it came to healthcare and education.This awareness quickly turned into chants and slogans echoing through the streets: “Dignity begins with schools and hospitals, not with putting on a show for the world.”What set this movement apart was not only its presence on the streets, but also the way it reinvented protest itself:Live filming: Phone cameras revealed events moment by moment, exposing abuses instantly.Memes and satire: A powerful weapon to dismantle authority’s aura, turning complex political discourse into viral, shareable content.Decentralized networks: No leader, no party, just small, fast-moving groups connected online, able to appear and disappear with agility.This generation doesn’t believe in grand speeches or delayed promises. They demand change here and now. Moving seamlessly between the physical and digital realms, they turn the street into a stage of revolt, and Instagram Live into an alternative media outlet.What’s happening in Morocco strongly recalls the Arab Spring of 2011, when young people flooded the streets with the same passion and spontaneity, armed only with belief in their power to spark change. But Gen Z added their own twist, digital tools, meme culture, and the pace of a hyper-connected world.Morocco’s Gen Z uprising is not just another protest, but a living experiment in how a digital generation can redefine politics itself. The spark may fade, but the mark it leaves on young people’s collective consciousness cannot be erased.Photo credits: Mosa’ab Elshamy, Zacaria Garcia, Abdel Majid Bizouat, Marouane Beslem" } , { "title" : "A Shutdown Exposes How Fragile U.S. Governance Really Is", "author" : "EIP Editors", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/a-shutdown-exposes-how-fragile-us-governance-really-is", "date" : "2025-10-01 22:13:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Cover_Gov_ShutDown.jpg", "excerpt" : "Each time the federal government shutters its doors, we hear the same reassurances: essential services will continue, Social Security checks will still arrive, planes won’t fall from the sky. This isn’t the first Governmental shutdown, they’ve happened 22 times since 1976, and their toll is real.", "content" : "Each time the federal government shutters its doors, we hear the same reassurances: essential services will continue, Social Security checks will still arrive, planes won’t fall from the sky. This isn’t the first Governmental shutdown, they’ve happened 22 times since 1976, and their toll is real.Shutdowns don’t mean the government stops functioning. They mean millions of federal workers are asked to keep the system running without pay. Air traffic controllers, border patrol agents, food inspectors — people whose jobs underpin both public safety and economic life — are told their labor matters, but their livelihoods don’t. People have to pay the price of bad bureaucracy in the world’s most powerful country, if governance is stalled, workers must pay with their salaries and their groceries.In 1995 and 1996, clashes between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich triggered two shutdowns totaling 27 days. In 2013, a 16-day standoff over the Affordable Care Act furloughed 850,000 workers. And in 2018–2019, the longest shutdown in U.S. history stretched 35 days, as President Trump refused to reopen the government without funding for a border wall. That impasse left 800,000 federal employees without paychecks and cost the U.S. economy an estimated $11 billion — $3 billion of it permanently lost.More troubling is what happens when crises strike during shutdowns. The United States is living in an age of accelerating climate disasters: historic floods in Vermont, wildfire smoke choking New York, hurricanes pounding Florida. These emergencies do not pause while Congress fights over budgets. Yet a shutdown means furloughed NOAA meteorologists, suspended EPA enforcement, and delayed FEMA programs. In the most climate-vulnerable decade of our lifetimes, we are choosing paralysis over preparedness.This vulnerability didn’t emerge overnight. For decades, the American state has been hollowed out under the logic of austerity and privatization, while military spending has remained sacrosanct. That imbalance is why budgets collapse under the weight of endless resources for war abroad, too few for resilience at home.Shutdowns send a dangerous message. They normalize instability. They tell workers they are disposable. They make clear that in our system, climate resilience and public health aren’t pillars of our democracy but rather insignificant in the face of power and greed. And each time the government closes, it becomes easier to imagine a future where this isn’t the exception but the rule.The United States cannot afford to keep running on shutdown politics. The climate crisis, economic inequality, and the challenges of sustaining democracy itself demand continuity, not collapse. We need a politics that treats stability and resilience not as partisan victories, but as basic commitments to one another. Otherwise, the real shutdown isn’t just of the government — it’s of democracy itself." } , { "title" : "There Was, There Was Not: Cinema as Collective Memory", "author" : "Emily Mkrtichian", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/this-essay-was-written-on-the-eve-of-the-five-year-anniversary-of-the-first-day-of-the-2020-artsakh-war", "date" : "2025-10-01 16:06:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_Cover_10_1_There_Was_Film.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "Join us for the New York Screening:7:00pm: Screening Begins8:30-9:00pm: Q&A with Celine and Emily9:15-11:30: Party at DCTV with small bites and DJEIP members 20% OFF CODE: Get your tickets hereCinema holds a singular place in our imagination, opening a shared space of possibility in both our individual and collective consciousness. At first, this might seem less true for nonfiction cinema, yet over nearly a decade of making my first feature, I’ve come to believe it has the power to cast a spell on how we experience reality and remember the past.In making There Was, There Was Not, I lived through a historical moment that became a fundamental rupture and trauma for my people - and now I can’t help but think about the archive obsessively. Its multitude of shortcomings but also its infinite potential and pivotal importance. My grandmothers and aunts were my personal archive - they taught me about the history of my family, which was also the history of our people. When your past is defined by movement and displacement, your lineage becomes a cultural encyclopedia, an embodied record of larger geopolitical events. The personal is political in every way.When I began making the film in 2016 it was originally meant to be a celebration of women like my grandmothers and aunts. These women are the stubborn, tender keepers of history and makers of a better future that I met and became close with during my time in the Republic of Artsakh - an ethnically Armenian autonomous region that fell into dispute after the fall of the Soviet Union. Artsakh was functioning as a de facto state for nearly three decades, and for Armenians, it is a symbol of self-determination, resistance, and the need to hold onto lands that have been systematically taken from us through violent means for more than a century. The formation of the republic of Artsakh was full of tales of freedom fighters, heroes and martyrs (mostly men), who gave their life so that our connection to our lands would remain unbroken. I envied this tenuous yet determined connection to place. My grandparents fled their village in Turkey during the 1915 genocide, and relocated several times before settling in Iran. So as someone who had been disconnected from land and history for two generations, I wanted to document women’s connection to it and fight for it. For all these reasons, I started filming with four women who were all fighting in their own way - fighting for Artsakh to be the place they dreamed and believed it could be.I have so many vivid memories of my time in Artsakh. It’s hard to describe the beauty of that place, but let me try. I know that remembering the joy I experienced there is some kind of conjuring.In Artsakh, it felt as if you were always surrounded by mountains. Everywhere you turned, there were thousand-year-old stone churches, ice-cold rushing rivers, lush wet forests, and sharp cliff lines threatening to drop out a thousand feet onto a green valley floor. The people were completely unhinged in their love for their homeland and their absolute existence in the present. I’ve never made so many toasts, ate so much fresh tonir bread, sat in cars with unknown destinations awaiting me, and cracked as many walnut shells in my hands as when I was in Artsakh.As I describe this ethereal, joyous existence, I can feel myself becoming wary and anxious about the next part of my story. I felt this way for years while I was making the film. One of the of women, Sose, expressed it perfectly in 2021 when I asked her, “Do you remember the first day the war started?” and she responded, “Yeah, but let me stay in this life.” She meant the life before. The life that exists in her memory and in mine. The life that overflowed with joy, abundance and freedom – however precarious.On the morning of September 27th in 2020, in the middle of COVID and 4 years into making my film, Artsakh was attacked along its borders and in its civilian cities.This is the day I became aware that my body is an archive.Over the next 45 days, I lived mostly in a bomb shelter and held desperately onto a camera like it was a lifeline that could convince the world - out there, looming, ignoring us - that this injustice must end. As it turns out, a camera is not capable of this. Or, the world is not capable of being truly moved to collective action by way of images alone. What the camera did do, though, was tether my life to the lives of the four women in wildly intimate and unexpected ways. Together, we learned the names of all major long and short-range missiles, drones, and rockets - and the specific sounds they made. We did everything in our power to help the thousands of people around us who were suffering. We fled in fear and returned in desperate need of proximity to each other and this place. We were not safe but felt that together somehow we could summon the strength to remain on that land and stay alive for as long as possible.As I watched and filmed, I felt something in my own body wake up. It guided me via intuition and care, and forms of knowledge I have never been able to put into words. It was everything my great grandmothers and grandmothers witnessed in their lifetimes, imprinted in my DNA, becoming available to me as an archive in my own body. I drew on that knowledge and strength and intuitive force constantly, and I know that it kept me alive.And I captured every moment I could, holding it in frames to keep it from disappearing, to grant it power and authority.And we watched as a place we loved deeply began to disappear in front of our eyes.In 2023, after nine months of being blockaded and deprived of food, fuel, and freedom of movement, Artsakh was ethnically cleansed of its remaining 120,000 Armenian residents, marking the end of thousands of years of our presence on that land.That is where my film ends.But for me, and for the women I filmed, and for the people of Artsakh, the story did not.Our witnessing and our memories became an archive for future resistance. As women, we pass on this knowledge in intimate ways—by creating lives imprinted with our experiences and by caring for, teaching and being in service to those around us.Ultimately, this work became a collaborative archive of relationships between women and our connection to a place that we no longer have access to. The act of watching the film together allows us to summon this land and the life lived on it through our collective imagination and psyche. In this way, cinema becomes an extension of the archive our bodies hold as witnesses—transforming into a tool to conjure Artsakh, bringing it back into existence and, as Sose said, allowing us to stay in that life and let it live into the future.There Was, There Was Not, titled after the Armenian version of “Once Upon a Time,” – the phrase that opened the stories I was raised on—is my way of honoring this evolving understanding of the archive and of cinema’s power to open new imaginative possibilities on the present, past and future. It is also a beginning, a foundation for future projects like Cartographies of Memories, a somatic, multimedia archive of Artsakh that continues this work of remembrance.Every image I captured became a finite archive, and now my work is to add to it.Cinematic work can be a subversion of erasure, transforming the archival act into something living, relational, and generative. It does not only preserve but imagines, offering a way to resist forgetting and to dream into a future where what was lost can still be carried forward.Let cinema be an act of creative resistance." } ] }