This Giza Brand is Turning Skate Culture Into a Style Language
FEAR2FUCKUP has evolved from a DIY passion project in 2023 into a full-throttle cultural movement. And now? The movement gets its first properly stitched manifesto: the #TEENAGEINTERRUPTED capsule.
Style can help you tell your story before you even open your mouth. And no one's telling the story louder, faster, or more unapologetically than FEAR2FUCKUP, the Giza-born underground skate brand-turned-movement spearheaded by Faris Rashwan, Cairo's 20-year-old creative mischief-maker and skater with a mission.
The local streetwear label was founded for the kids who never fit in - to give them something of their own. Rooted in Cairo's skate culture and shaped by the chaos, creativity and contradictions of the city, the brand speaks in oversized silhouettes and bold graphics.
Since its DIY beginnings in 2023, FEAR2FUCKUP has carved out a whole new subculture, starting in Cairo's ramps and side streets till finding its way on the backs of local rappers, stylists, and anyone whose idea of a good time involves a board, a bassline, and a whole lot of attitude. And now, with the brand's first official capsule collection, that story just got a little more stitched-in.
The capsule is dubbed #TEENAGEINTERRUPTED, a name that sounds like a throwback film and a therapy session rolled into one - and in many ways, it is. Rashwan frames it as a 'farewell to my teenage years.' but don't reach for the tissues just yet. This is no maudlin introspection. If anything, it's a remix; part nostalgia, part razor-sharp, and all Cairo.
So, what's in the vault? A mauve short-sleeve shirt, block-printed with the brand's key icon, sweatshorts that are both knee-high and high-concept, and a polo shirt, a summer-y puffer bag. All injected with the FEAR2FUCKUP DNA: bold colours, clever graphics, and silhouettes built to move, fall, and fly again.
'I feel like I've perfected a balance between design scales, placements, and colours in this collection,' Faris tells CairoScene 'It's minimal, but it still goes hard.'
The collection marks a shift in how the brand drops too. Rather than timed seasonal dumps, #TEENAGEINTERRUPTED is rolling out piece by piece- partly for pacing, partly because the manufacturing grind is still, as Faris puts it, 'insanely tough.' But the intent is clear: this is slow fashion for a fast-moving subculture.
And if you missed out on last year's hottest tees (the ones that sold out in record time)? Good news: they're back. Bad news: you still probably won't cop one unless you're quick.
At the heart of it all? Skateboarding. 'It's what inspired me to even get dressed & put the swag on in the first place,' Faris says. 'It'll always be the backbone of streetwear and culture. It's the gateway for a lot of kids who don't fit in with the pop crowd to make their own world.'
'We're just being ourselves and representing where we come from in the freshest way possible,' he says. 'We're shaping the new swag.'
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CairoScene
18-07-2025
- CairoScene
The Real Pyramid Scheme: The Colonial Issue at Egyptology's Core
In 2016, two artists walked into Berlin's Neues Museum with a hacked Xbox Kinect sensor concealed in a scarf. They weren't tourists. They weren't researchers. They were there to perform a unique heist. In front of them stood the bust of Queen Nefertiti: serene, ancient, impossibly elegant. She had been excavated from Amarna, her home in Egypt, in 1912 by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt and exported to Germany through deliberate deception. In official documents, Borchardt described her as a painted plaster head of no significant value. Privately, he called her 'the most beautiful object ever found.' Germany has refused every request for her return ever since - they've never even allowed a brief loan. Al-Badri and Nelles lingered in front of the queen, pretending to gawk at her while the Kinect sensor - originally designed for video games - captured thousands of data points from every angle. This modified sensor, rigged with custom software, allowed them to collect a three-dimensional scan of the sculpture, effectively digitising her form without ever touching her. The artists later released the scan online: a 21-million-polygon model of the bust, open-source and freely downloadable. Anyone in the world could now 3D-print Nefertiti, remix her, replicate her, reclaim her. Soon after, a replica made from the artists' data was unveiled in Cairo. Nefertiti, displaced for over a century, had returned home - if only in likeness. They called their project The Other Nefertiti. It was a counter-archive. A radical gesture aimed at breaking the aura of museum authority and disrupting the fiction of cultural neutrality. A reclamation by simulation. They wanted to activate the artefact, to inspire a critical reassessment of today's conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of grabbing in Germany. And it provoked precisely the kind of questions that Egyptology, for over two centuries, has avoided: Who owns the past? Who controls its images, its language, its circulation? What is more original, an object in glass behind museum walls, or a copy that breathes back into the culture from which it was extracted? To speak of decolonisation, then, is not simply to demand the return of artefacts. It is to reclaim the right to interpret, to narrate, to critique. It is to dismantle the systems, academic, bureaucratic, financial, that continue to privilege foreign voices and frameworks. It is to insist that heritage is not a spectacle, nor a commodity, nor a weapon. It is a relationship. "Not through national branding or a single triumphant repatriation, but through democratising knowledge, restoring agency, and building political coalitions,' Monica Hanna tells CairoScene. As Dr. Monica Hanna, a renowned Egyptian Egyptologist has argued in her paper 'Contesting the Lonely Queen' against the myth of universal museum, the bust is not just removed from place, but from meaning. 'The reality of imperialistic museums,' Hanna argues, 'is that they permanently store decontextualised things of one culture in a museum of another… The experience of the bust of Nefertiti has always been limited to those who could visit her in her confinement in Berlin, decontextualised from the materiality of her background of discovery in the mudbrick workshop of Tuthmosis… and disconnected from the sensoriality of her Indigenous community.' She calls the Neues Museum a heterotopia, a Foucaultian non-place, where a single, highly curated version of the past is staged under the illusion of neutrality. In that dimly lit rotunda, Nefertiti is less a queen than a projection: a European fantasy of ancient Egypt, frozen in plaster, beauty and captivity. The question is not whether Nefertiti belongs to Egypt. It is whether we are ready to acknowledge that she was taken, misrepresented, and used to scaffold Western identity at the expense of her own. And it is the real problem with Egyptology today. Until she returns home, that story remains unfinished. I often return to one page in 'The Future of Egyptology', the most recent book by Dr. Monica Hanna. In it, she recalls the ransacking of the Mallawi Museum in Minya in August 2013, a moment of chaos and erasure that rarely makes its way into national memory. One teenage boy, she writes, was seen running from the looted site with an artefact in his hands. When Hanna stopped him, he told her plainly that it was fine to take it because, he said, 'the museum belongs to the government.' That sentence has stayed with me for its brazenness, and its clarity. Behind it is not malice, but a quiet, inherited disconnection. A belief that heritage is not ours but theirs, that these statues and stelae and fragments of wall text belong to an apparatus of power, not to the people who live in their shadow. Because it reveals the extent to which so many of us Egyptians, through no fault of their own, have been estranged from the very culture others cross continents to study, a culture often depicted as a lost one but in fact still very alive up to this day. 'Many Western scholars audaciously express how Ancient and Modern Egypt are two hermetically sealed entities, where the modern does not identify with the ancient.' Hanna tells CairoScene. Years of colonial power didn't just remove objects, they stripped away the tongue and the knowledge. Those who once held meaning, who passed stories through gesture, ritual, or oral memory, were sidelined until the story of ancient Egypt was no longer told by its descendants, but by foreigners first, in French, German, English. By the time Egyptians were invited back into the narrative, it had already been framed, captioned and curated for someone else. This is not a crisis of patriotism or awareness but the residue of centuries of colonial sediment, of knowledge extracted, names overwritten, meanings translated and retranslated until they no longer land. Egyptology, as a discipline, was not built for Egyptians. It was built on them, around them, and often without them. It catalogued ruins but ignored the living. It preserved history while denying people their relationship to it. So when we speak now of 'decolonising' or 'decentralising' Egyptology, the question is not whether the field can be reformed. It's whether it can be reclaimed. Whether Egyptians, not just scholars and officials, but ordinary people, can once again see themselves not as caretakers of foreign interest, but as inheritors of a complex, living past. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt not only with soldiers, but with scientists. His was not just a military campaign, it was an intellectual invasion. The scholars and savants who accompanied him mapped the Nile, measured temples, copied inscriptions, and compiled what would become 'Description de l'Égypte', a multi-volume monument to European conquest through knowledge. It marked the birth of modern Egyptology, and the beginning of its dislocation. The Egypt they documented was reframed not as a lived, layered land but as the cradle of Western civilisation, frozen in antiquity, severed from its continuities. I call it mythmaking: an origin story curated for the West, built on the erasure of the present and often-times maniac colonial kitsch. Christian Langer, in his essay for Critical Epistemologies of Global Politics, calls this 'epistemic colonisation.' Unlike formal colonialism, which operates through flags and borders, epistemic colonisation exerts its power through knowledge production. It is enacted not by generals, but by scholars and institutions, museums, universities, editorial boards. The archaeologist granted unrestricted access, the foreign mission that dominates excavations, the museum that guards looted artefacts under the pretext of universal heritage. The story of Egyptology is, at heart, a story of dispossession. While pharaonic monuments are scrubbed, lit,and photographed for glossy brochures, the broader texture of Egypt's historical identity, oral traditions, and village memoryscapes, the very structures that can be traced back to the ancient Egyptian civilisation, remains underfunded, unarchived and frequently erased. The result is a curated illusion: a country proud of its ancient grandeur, yet estranged from it, all while Joe Rogan and Aaron Rodgers confidently discuss the presence of submarines and helicopters on temple walls. It's a form of temporal segregation. Ancient Egypt is treated as a glorious but dead civilisation, valuable only when extracted, classified and displayed. Contemporary Egyptians, in this framework, are not the inheritors of pharaonic legacy but its accidental neighbours. And when Egyptian archaeologists do enter the field, they are too often expected to mimic the tools, citations and tones of Western academia to gain legitimacy. Access is conditional. Voice is conditional. In recent years, the call to decolonise Egyptology has gained momentum. Conferences now feature panels on inclusivity. Grants are allocated for Egyptian scholars. Partnerships are struck between foreign and local institutions. But how much of this is performance? Austrian archaeologist Uroš Matić, in his 2023 paper 'Postcolonialism as a Reverse Discourse in Egyptology', warns that much of this activity reproduces, rather than dismantles, colonial logic. The discipline, he argues, has adopted postcolonial theory like a costume, borrowing terms like 'hybridity,' 'entanglement' and 'third space' without understanding their origins or implications. In postcolonial theory, hybridity is a powerful concept. It's not just about cultural mixing or visual combinations. As theorist Homi Bhabha explains, hybridity is about what happens when the colonised mimic the coloniser, not to become them, but to subtly expose and undermine their authority. It's a kind of resistance that happens in the cracks - an 'in-between' space where power is echoed, exaggerated and sometimes turned against itself. A true example of postcolonial hybridity in Egyptology might look very different. It could be an Egyptian archaeologist working within a major European museum, using the tools, language and authority of that institution not just to fit in, but to challenge how Egypt's past is represented, to call out colonial theft and to push for the return of looted artefacts. That's hybridity as resistance: using the master's tools to dismantle, or at least rattle, the master's house. What Matić warns against is the way Egyptology often borrows postcolonial terms like 'hybridity' but strips them of this meaning. The word becomes aesthetic, something about appearance, rather than political. In doing so, the field gives itself the appearance of being critical or decolonial, while continuing to operate within the same old frameworks. Or consider 'entanglement' - a concept introduced by archaeologist Ian Hodder to describe mutual dependencies between people and things. In theory, it offers a way to trace complex histories of interaction. But in practice, it often becomes a euphemism for occupation. Matić calls this dynamic 'reverse discourse', another Foucauldian term for when the language of liberation is used within the very framework of domination. Postcolonial concepts are deployed not to critique power, but to camouflage it. Reclaiming Egyptology requires more than symbolic gestures, it demands structural transformation across every layer of the field. It begins with reforming excavation labour practices aligned with today's cost of living, offering transparent briefings about the significance of the work, and crediting local labourers in publications. Beyond the site, it means building democratic infrastructure, funding regional libraries and cultural centres in Upper Egypt and the Delta, translating core Egyptological texts into Arabic, and establishing community heritage councils with decision-making power. Central to this vision is the digitisation and repatriation of archives, and training students in digital curation and storytelling. Hanna reframes restitution not merely as the return of objects, but as a return of authorship - insisting that the right to interpret Egypt's past be restored to Egyptians through shared authorship, visible credit and contextualised exhibitions. Finally, she calls for regional political alliances, working alongside nations like Iraq, Greece and Sudan to coordinate diplomatic and legal pressure on European museums, and forming transnational councils to demand accountability and co-create new models of cultural sovereignty. What would a truly Egyptian Egyptology look like? Perhaps it would begin not with tombs, but with testimonies. Not with gold masks, but with memories. It would recognise that the language of the past still lives, in songs, in crafts, in rituals passed between Egyptian grandmothers and grandchildren. It would be less about possession, and more about care. What was taken from us was the authority to remember, to interpret, to feel. And that cannot be returned through loans or replicas. It must be reclaimed, patiently, politically, and with the same quiet insistence that once built this marvellous world.
CairoScene
16-07-2025
- CairoScene
Renowned Chef Mads Refslund Loves the Chaos of Egypt's Food Culture
In this Scene Eats exclusive interview, Refslund takes us through what it takes to create a dining experience that speaks to the people, place and culture of a space. Jul 16, 2025 On Egypt's North Coast, where the Mediterranean softens into a salt breeze and the desert exhales into design, Chef Mads Refslund is doing what he does best: starting from scratch. 'Everywhere I go,' he says, 'I'm trying to tell a story from the time and place I'm at.' That place, for now, is Ramla - Marakez's sandy beachfront escape, built for the art of slow living, is now the refined stretch of shoreline hosting the opening act of WHEN WE EAT's Signature Dinner Series - a month-long culinary project bringing global chefs to Sahel's coast from July 15 to August 15. First to arrive is Refslund, the Danish-born co-founder of Noma - one of the most influential restaurants in the world - and the chef behind Brooklyn's genre-defying ILIS, named Best New Restaurant 2023 by Esquire and Most Important Restaurant Opening 2024 by La Liste. A pioneer of the New Nordic movement, Refslund is known for his fire-and-ice cooking philosophy, his obsession with fermentation, and a forager's respect for the natural world. His three-night residency - running July 16, 17, and 19 - reframes coastal Egyptian ingredients through his singular lens. Think seafood, fruit, salt, flame. But don't expect a menu printed in advance. 'Everyone wants a menu up front,' he says, 'but I want to create it when I get here - when I can smell and taste everything.' That meant a 4 a.m. trip to Alexandria's oldest fish market, where chaos and tradition mingle in a salt-stung air. 'It felt like walking into something that's been happening for 60 years. Very hectic. But I loved it.' From those stalls to the seaside table, Refslund builds his menu in real time: hyper-local ingredients transformed through fire and intuition. 'It'll be a mix of the way we cook and all the ingredients from here,' he says. 'It has to feel rooted.' And though the flavours may be unexpected, his hope is human. 'Hopefully a lot of these people will become friends,' he says. 'Sharing a good meal is something that talks to the heart.' Refslund is just the beginning. He'll be followed by Kelvin Cheung of Jun's in Dubai (ranked No. 7 on MENA's 50 Best Restaurants 2025), known for his vibrant takes on diasporic Indian-Chinese flavours, and Brando Moros of Michelin-starred 11 Woodfire (No. 28 on the list), whose food draws power from char, smoke, and the purity of a single flame-kissed ingredient. The season's final supper takes place on August 15th, when Alex Atala - chef of D.O.M. in São Paulo (2 Michelin stars) - prepares a one-night-only multi-sensory dinner beside Ramla's tidal pools. For bookings head to:
Al-Ahram Weekly
13-07-2025
- Al-Ahram Weekly
Jane Birkin's original Hermès bag sells at auction for whopping 8.6 million euros - Style - Life & Style
The first Birkin handbag — the prototype for fashion's must-have accessory — sold for a staggering 8.6 million euros ($10.1 million), including fees, in Paris to become the second most valuable fashion item ever sold at auction. The winning bid of 7 million euros drew gasps and applause from the audience. The price crushed the previous auction record for a handbag — $513,040 paid in 2021 for a Hermès White Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Diamond Retourne Kelly 28. Now, the original Birkin bag, named after the actor, singer and fashion icon that Hermès created it for — the late Jane Birkin — is in a new league of its own. Only one fashion item has sold at auction for more: a pair of ruby red slippers from 'The Wizard of Oz', which sold for $32.5 million in 2024, Sotheby's said. The Paris auction room buzzed with anticipation as the sale got underway, with the auctioneer reminding the crowd that the bag was 'totally unique' and 'the most famous bag of all time.' The bidding started at 1 million euros but quickly increased, with telephone bidders fighting it out at the end. With Sotheby's fees included, the total price for the winning bidder from Japan was a cool 8.6 million euros, the auction house said. From the starting price, bids rocketed past 2 million euros, then 3 million, 4 million and 5 million, to astonished gasps. When the price jumped from 5.5 million to 6 million euros in one swoop, there were whistles and applause The final bids were 6.2 million euros, then 6.5 million, then 6.8 million before the Japanese buyer's last winning bid: 7 million euros. Sotheby's didn't identify the buyer. Nine collectors bidding by telephone, online, and in the room competed in the 10-minute auction battle, with the private collector from Japan beating a last remaining other bidder at the end Paris fashion house Hermès exclusively commissioned the bag for the London-born Birkin in 1984 — branding it with her initials J.B. on the front flap, below the lock — and delivered the finished one-of-a-kind bag to her the following year, Sotheby's said. The subsequent commercialized version of Birkin's bag went on to become one of the world's most exclusive luxury items, extravagantly priced and with a yearslong waiting list. The bag was born of a fortuitous encounter on a London-bound flight in the 1980s with the then-head of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas. Birkin recounted in subsequent interviews that the pair got talking after she spilled some of her things on the cabin floor. Birkin asked Dumas why Hermès didn't make a bigger handbag and sketched out on an airplane vomit bag the sort of hold-all that she would like. He then had an example made for her and, flattered, she agreed when Hermès asked whether it could commercialize the bag in her name. 'There is no doubt that the Original Birkin bag is a true one-of-a-kind — a singular piece of fashion history that has grown into a pop culture phenomenon that signals luxury in the most refined way possible. It is incredible to think that a bag initially designed by Hermès as a practical accessory for Jane Birkin has become the most desirable bag in history,' said Morgane Halimi, Sotheby's head of handbags and fashion. The bag became so famous that Birkin once mused before her death in 2023 at age 76 that her obituaries would likely 'say, 'Like the bag' or something.' 'Well, it could be worse,' she added. Sotheby's said that seven design elements on the handcrafted all-black leather prototype set it apart from Birkins that followed. It's the only Birkin with a nonremovable shoulder strap — fitting for the busy life and practicality of the singer, actor, social activist and mother who was also known for her romantic relationship with French singer Serge Gainsbourg and their duets that included the steamy 1969 song 'Je t'aime moi non plus' ('I Love You, Me Neither'). Her bag also had a nail clipper attached, because Birkin 'was never one for long painted nails,' Sotheby's said The bag that Hermès handmade for her, developed off its existing Haut A Courroies model, also has gilded brass hardware, bottom studs and other features that differ from commercial Birkins. Birkin's casual, breezy style in the 1960s and early 1970s — long hair with bangs, jeans paired with white tops, knit minidresses and basket bags — still epitomizes the height of French chic for many women around the world. When Birkin chatted to Hermès' Dumas on the Paris-to-London flight about what her ideal handbag would be, she'd been in the habit of carrying her things around in a wicker basket, because she felt handbags in the 1980s were too small, Sotheby's said. She was traveling with her young daughter, Charlotte, and complained that she couldn't find a bag suitable for her needs as a mother, Hermès says. Hermès later gifted her four other Birkin bags. She kept the prototype for nearly a decade, before auctioning it for an AIDS charity in 1994. It was auctioned again in 2000 and had since been in private hands. The previous owner, who identified herself only as Catherine B., told journalists at the auction that the bag 'has all the attributes of a star.' 'The price is the price of the Hermès story,' she said. Sotheby's called it 'more than just a bag.' 'The Birkin has evolved from a practical accessory to become a timeless cultural icon,' it said. 'Its presence spans the worlds of music, film, television and the arts,' it added. 'It is a red-carpet staple, a fashion magazine mainstay, and a coveted piece in the wardrobes of celebrities, artists and stylists.' Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
