Exclusive Preview: Kojak's 'Beyond The Veil' Collection

What happens when you die? Not to you; your body, soul, or otherwise – but to the world and people within it that you’ve left behind. The aftermath of someone’s passing is exactly the central theme upon which local designer Mohanad Kojak’s latest collection revolves.

Over the past few days, one certain image has dominated the Instasphere – that of a blurred teaser photo from Kojak’s latest collection, Beyond The Veil, posted on the accounts of all the fashion flock across the city. Bit by bit, the young ground-breaking designer has been releasing images of the full campaign for his F/W16 shoot, revealing the collection in striking increments.

“The concept of the shoot, the main inspiration, is a funeral,” Kojak tells us. Always one to push boundaries and opt for the unconventional, it was the notion that an event dedicated to a person who is noticeable absent from it is what sparked the designer’s mind on this particular shoot. “It’s mainly inspired by a death experience as I’ve always felt that it’s very weird and awkward that when you die, people gather for you and you’re not attending this gathering, you’re not involved in it. So I always wanted to see how people act and react in this event. So that was the concept.”

“Each person in the shoot represents a certain category of people in my life,” he explains, “My mom represents family. Some of the models were representative of the professional sphere, other models represent friends, others relationships, and others still were symbolic of enemies – or close enemies to you; people who pretend to be friends but they’re not.”

The collection maintains the same element of drama that has come to be something of a signature for the designer but in this collection, and this shoot, gone is that whimsical sense of bohemia with outfits laden with pastel hues and watercolour shades; instead it is bold, dramatic, but as always, stunning and still maintains his distinct identity and stamp of the theatrical. “On this collection I worked more on refining and detailing and neat cuts,” he tells.

Take a look at the campaign below, including unreleased images.