Maissane Zinai

Central Saint Martins

BA Womenswear

The first motivation for Maissane Zinai's work is a visceral need to tell stories and make shelters for the individuals who hope for something more than what everyday life provides us. It articulates questions of cultures and dimensions which can be physical, artificial, virtual, or sensorial.

Since a young age, Maissane has been passionate about mythology, antics and contemporaries, linguistics, theology but also martial sports, music, and cinema. Topics that are able to unite individuals around community convictions and mind/physical practice. Her designs are seen as a revisit of her Algerian cultural roots mixed with dynamic shapes, futuristic/sci-fi influences and a hint of humour.

From clothes design to spatial design, Maissane is interested in creating new folklores and narrative textures. Her practice extends to world design crossing frontiers between fashion, medicine, spirituality, digital and biosciences. These realistic fantasies become a platform to explore our physical relation to our environment, memories, and synesthesia with other creatives. An aggregate space to try different things with new frameworks, showing new endings to our separate narratives yet additionally a portal to raise awareness about neurodivergences such as autism. Through leather and silk, metal and bioplastic, sound and 3D landscapes, they aim to find grace through harshness, fluidity from discipline, universalism from individualism.