This month, Mariam Daoud Designs will celebrate its first birthday, and will be in the midst of launching its Spring/Summer 2019 collection, 'Doves'. Inspired by the bird’s “minimal color palette,” as Daoud calls it, she found the challenge to come up with seventeen different designs using just a few colors all the more enjoyable.

Other than using actual doves in the photoshoots and spending hours perfecting the set, the new collection is also meant to inspire and empower women, integrating poetry in their social media posts as well.

“It took a lot of time and effort to come up with this collection, and I love all my pieces - exactly like they’re my children,” Daoud told CairoScene when asked about a favorite piece. “Before I’m a fashion designer, I’m an artist."

Her new collection can be found in her showroom in Sheraton, Heliopolis where her atelier also is, and in Weaving Grace Egypt, a high-end, multi-brand store in Zamalek.

Ready to hit the international market, Daoud knows she’s top quality and ready for the big market. She checks the finishing on every dress she makes two to three times, and doesn’t leave it until she’s sure the woman wearing it can wear it inside-out and still be able to pull it off.

“It’s easy to make a nice-looking dress, but it isn’t easy to make quality. And it’s all about the quality,” shes says.

Dreaming of becoming a fashion designer ever since she was a child, she couldn’t find colleges offering degrees in fashion or design in Egypt, so she studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo, later specialising in Costume Design with the Theater and Film’s Decor Department.

She then proceeded to take online courses and all the fashion and fashion design courses she could find, along with courses in illustration, color psychology and even photography, to enhance her skillset, which proved helpful as she embarked into the fashion world.

In August of 2018, Daoud was able to finally hire the perfect team to work on her first collection, 'The Rebirth of Fashion', and launched it in December 2018.

Check out more from Mariam Daoud Designs on Instagram.