A Letter from AlUla, Written in Thread

Saudi label HINDAMME, led by designer Mohammed Khoja, has unveiled a limited-edition collection co-created with more than twenty-six artisans from Madrasat Addeera — the first arts and design centre in AlUla, housed in what was once the region’s first school for girls.

The collection draws its visual language directly from the landscape itself. AlUla is often described as an open-air library: petroglyphs and inscriptions in Dadanitic and Lihyanite have stood on the rocks of Jabal Ikmah since the first millennium BCE. Symbols carved by hands long vanished now find new life on abayas and shirts, intertwined with illustrations of the desert’s living world — the moringa tree, the Arabian oryx, the flora and fauna that have shared this place with people for seven thousand years.

Each piece took between one and two months to complete. The artisans worked in block printing, hand embroidery, silk-screen and metalwork — slow techniques in a fast world. The result is not merely a reference to heritage but a way of carrying it, stitch by stitch, into the present tense.

“AlUla has been a source of inspiration and creativity,” said Hamad AlHomiedan, Director of Arts and Creative Industries at the Royal Commission for AlUla.

For Khoja, the project is a continuation of a longer dialogue with the region — one that began in 2019 with a collection exhibited at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia. He describes AlUla as a place where history feels layered and alive, and where heritage is not preserved behind glass but evolved, worn, and carried forward.

Mona Al Joud, a textiles artisan at Madrasat Addeera, put it more simply: every piece carries a story, and a great deal of love, precision and intention go into each stitch and cut.

What makes this project quietly remarkable is not only the beauty of the garments, but the model behind them. Madrasat Addeera, located in the AlJadidah Arts District, has become a hub where traditional crafts are passed down through immersive, hands-on training. It supports a year-round public programme of workshops and a vocational economy built around the careful, deliberate work of human hands. In a Kingdom — and a world — racing toward the digital and the immediate, this is a counter-current worth noticing.

The eight designs born of this collaboration speak, in the end, of something larger than fashion. They argue that craft is a form of memory, that a piece of clothing can be a letter from one place to the rest of the world, and that the most modern things we can wear may be the ones rooted most deeply in time.

The limited-edition HINDAMME × Madrasat Addeera collection is available at Madrasat Addeera and online.