Even Vogue editors have days when their outfit doesn’t quite match up to what they want it to be, like when forced to wear leggings to Reformer Pilates even though you loathe any form of activewear, ending up in an evening gown that couldn’t be further from your style, because you panicked about a black-tie dress code, or attempting to look pristine at a work meeting when your toddler has used your clothing as a colouring book.
Fashion’s favourite foodie Laila Gohar has no such days. The Cairo-born, New York-based culinary trailblazer – whose avant-garde and narrative-infused culinary installations have included triple-tier langoustine towers for Sotheby’s, a dessert spanning 15 metres for Hermès, and an abstract field of baklava for 600 people at Art Basel Doha – carves chicken for dinner wearing a red vinyl Courrèges minidress, squeezes ketchup and mustard onto sausage rolls in chic striped shirting and works out in pearlescent Simone Rocha hair clips and Crocs. Despite the hazards of the job – think: icing splodges and fruit juice sprays – she opts to wear her finest fashion day in, day out. “Without sounding cheesy, it’s such a blessing to be able to do these things,” she says. “To be able to cook for your friends, to be healthy enough to go to the gym… every day is a good day.”
Endlessly good days are coming for us too, thanks to Gohar’s new collaboration with Nordic lifestyle brand Arket on a 27-piece ready-to-wear collection that fuses utilitarian, uniform-inspired silhouettes with intricate handwork and lighter-than-air fabrications. None of which, she emphasises, should be reserved for special occasions! Gohar launched her own home décor label Gohar World with her sister Nadia in 2020 (we love her candles resembling hunks of salami, porcelain egg earrings and dinky lace aprons for champagne bottles), but the Arket collection is her first fully-fledged clothing line, born from a process she describes as “building a little world”.
The collab kicked off at Arket’s design headquarters in Stockholm, where Gohar met head of design and creative, Ella Soccorsi, armed with trinkets and ephemera, like scraps of fabrics and old keychains, that served as collection “conversation starters”. “It was a long meeting,” she shares.
For Soccorsi, the joy of collaborating with Gohar came from not just her fanciful and humorous take on culinary tradition and craft, but her desire to “celebrate every day.” Together, they began transforming Gohar’s web of references – such as the translucencies of a dress in a favourite painting, an affection for tactile box pleating, an obsession with socks and a love of “discount-bin brown” – into a cohesive collection.
The pieces we’ll be sporting all summer long? An easy apron-inspired blouse which ties at the back, a cheeky transparent skirt in ecru silk organza, a crochet basket bag sprinkled with beads, a sugared almond-pink boxy shirt and chocolate brown loafers. Gohar is emphatic that the designs reflect “fabulousness” rather than “playfulness”, but there is a certain wink to her profession in the silhouette she’d choose to wear to cook breakfast for her partner, the chef Ignacio Mattos, and her young son, Paz, in her Tribeca loft: “The long white dress with the cut-out at the waist,” she noted. “Obviously, chefs wear whites to cook in, but I like the cheekiness of wearing something as dramatic as white to cook at home in. Guests are so concerned it is going to stain.”
Gohar and Arket’s universe came to fruition on 19 April at design mecca Salone del Mobile in Milan, where Gohar staged an installation that saw the decorative horse seating of an old Italian carousel swapped for carriages resembling giant vegetables. The entertainment for the evening? The London Vegetable Orchestra, the only ensemble in the UK that performs using hand-crafted carrot recorders, butternut squash trombones and pumpkin drums. “I’m rarely ever starstruck, but will be in front of them,” adds Gohar. It sounds like yet another good day.
