Few years ago, I moved to Neve Sha'anan, a neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. I was curious about the history of the area, and a friend recommended reading “White city, Black city” by Sharon Rotbard.  In his book, Rotbard criticizes a common narrative, suggesting Tel Aviv was mostly founded by national and municipal institutes. Rotbard claims the story is not complete and sheds light only on certain aspects of the truth.

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The white city of Tel Aviv was declared a UNESCO world cultural heritage site due to “an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century”. Rotbard argues that the heritage commemorated by UNESCO excludes the foundation of southern neighborhoods, like Neve Sha’anan, and the Arab settlements that existed in the area hundreds of years before that, as part of the Ottoman empire.

 

Rotbard closes his book with the description of contemporary Tel Aviv, a multicultural complex city,
as opposed to the monochromatic white image depicted in the main narrative. Tel-Jaffa is a collection aimed at honoring the culture that is excluded from that main narrative. Combining the style of dress that was customary in Ottoman Jaffa into the style that currently dominates the streets of Tel Aviv was the key to this creation. In my view, combining Arabic elements grants the ‘Tel-Avivian’ style a sense of locality and relevance, while shedding light on the gaps and conflicts of the Israeli society. The collection is exploring traditional Arabic elements of the 1920’s and 1930’s, like draping and soft round silhouettes. These were combined into iconic current streetwear items. In order to emphasize the contrast between the elements of the collection, I used only two main colors, black and white. All the prints are gold, as is customary in Arab visual culture.