Yasmeen Mjalli’s parents grew up in a Palestinian farming town. However, they immigrated to the United States for her adolescence and she grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The family would take annual summer trips to visit her grandparents and other relatives in Tubas, a city in the West Bank.

Her mom was very involved in their Palestinian community in North Carolina, so she would always bring Mjalli and her siblings to fundraisers and protests. While there was an understanding of an “occupation” that was a big deal, Mjalli didn’t understand the intricacies at that young age.

Within an American school system that was mostly white, having a different background – Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim – often left her feeling out of place.

Even just with food alone, she was told she was weird for bringing traditional Palestinian food like pomegranates instead of typical American snacks, not being able to eat pork like when Zaxby’s ham sandwiches that were ordered for the class, or fasting for Ramadan during lunch time. These kinds of moments, which extended outside of food as well, led to struggles to fit in and social frustration through her years of education.

Later, Mijalli attended the University of North Carolina, studying art history, and stared a Master’s program at Duke University where she concentrated on women in the Middle East – before she decided she was unhappy there and decided to leave for her family’s homeland.

“My mom and dad moved when they got married to the U.S. and they lived there for two decades,” she told Vogue in 2020. “They realized how Americanized their kids were becoming, and this huge imbalance between their American identity and their Palestinian identity.”

Her parents moved back, and soon Mijali did as well. They settled in Ramallah, where Mijalli started to also live after 2017, before later moving elsewhere in the West Bank.

“Sometimes I look back to who I was as a young girl and cannot recognize myself. Born to Muslim-Palestinian parents in the American south, I was a deeply angry child struggling with the pain of balancing (and failing miserably) two discordant worlds.

I could not understand why my mother refused to learn English, why she always reached for the Fairouz CD, why she always made makloubeh and warak dawali, even after I begged her to make meatloaf. Looking back, she knew the beauty of the people I could never understand until I moved back.”

Moving to Ramallah was a wake up call, and gave Mjalli a real understanding of what it meant to be a Palestinian on a daily basis in the West Bank. Part of this was the borders and treatment from Israeli soldiers, of course, but it also took adjusting to get to know Palestinian society.

This included reckoning with established codes of conduct, like how a woman’s actions were expected to be. Her kindness and friendliness, for example, were often interpreted as sexual advances. She stopped smiling, making eye contact, and started dressing more conservatively. Yet she quickly realized this made her profoundly unhappy to be so restricted in toning down her personality, expression, and decisions.

Soon after, Mjalli started making jackets with the slogan “Not Your Habiti” (Arabic for my dear / my love) to confront street harassment of women and for them to reclaim their own identities. This led to creating BabyFist, her initial clothing line, in April 2017.

Mjalli also created a typewriter project with this idea, where she invited other women to come and share their own experiences of harassment and gender repression or discrimination.

Baby Fist expanded to a larger line, and eventually a shop in Ramallah, with clothes manufactured in Gaza. "I really think if you are going to produce clothing for a cause, it has to adhere to moral and ethical codes all around," Mjalli said at the time. This also helped provide jobs in Gaza, which then had a high unemployment rate.

That production decision caused ongoing challenges due to Israel’s blockade and military checkpoints. Yet when it took months for jackets to be shipped during the 2018 Great March of Return protests, Mjalli did not fret. Instead, she explained the reality to her audience and customers – making it a teaching moment. She said to Vogue:

“There is this demand for transparency and ethical production. When you order the clothes online, it comes in a plastic bag, at your doorstep, and you don’t have to think about the human chain that had to come together and bring it through your door.

We use the opportunity not only to humanize the process of clothing production, but to illustrate the political circumstances in how our clothing is produced, whether you are in Indonesia, India, or you’re in Palestine.”

Baby Fist also ran a Menstruation Education Campaign, hosting reproductive health workshops for girls in Palestinian public schools.

After three years, Mijalli out grew Baby Fist and wanted to start something different, more aligned with all that she had learned.

Thus, Nöl Collective was born in 2020.

The word Nöl in Arabic (نول) means loom – a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. “Palestine has been popular in dyeing and weaving for centuries,” Mijalli wrote when announcing the name change. “The textile industry relied on manual looms.”

In November 2020, after the launch, Mijalli explained origin of the name to People of Colour Collective (POCC) Magazine:

“I had stumbled across a 1975 photo of a man on the Gaza beach. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth and was surrounded by a halo of coloured yarns placed all around the beach. He had washed each roll of yarn in the seawater to stabilize the vivid blues, yellows, and reds.

Immediately I was drawn, asking myself what this man was doing and how I had never learned about anything even close to what he was doing. It was yet another part of our culture that I hadn’t learned about, yet became ravenous to know more.

After weeks and weeks of research, I had learned that these yarns had been dyed with plants and spices native to Palestine like indigo and sumac. The man on the beach was stabilizing the colours with seawater before the yarns eventually made their way onto a loom where they would be woven into the fabric for carpets, furniture, and clothing.

It was a deeply intimate relationship between the Palestinians and their land, a harmonious relationship only indigenous peoples know. I fell in love with the loom (which is the English word for Nöl) because it represented this collective process to create something beautiful, intentional, and sustainable.”

Mijalli also explained the process: The first stage was the preparation of raw material (camel's hair, sheep's wool, goat's gair), where the colors of raw wool were then separated from each other. The next step was drying, spinning, and converting to threads.

Those threads were sent for dyeing to turn into bright colors, which would then be washed with the sea water of Gaza to stablize the colors.

The dyes themselves were typically produced from local plants and insects. Examples include:

• Red from pomegranate and madder root

• Blue from the indigo plant

• Yellow from grape leaves or saffron

• Blue from walnut shells

• Yellow-green from sumac

Villages were often associated with the use of specific colors and threads.

The threads were then woven into many things (with looms) such as carpets, gowns, horse saddles, children's swings, and more.

This type of education is an example of what Mijalli shares on the Nöl account on social media.

Just as she had kept production local for Baby Fist, Mijalli continued that for Nöl – but expanded to more areas across all of Palestine.

With Baby Fist, Nöl had worked with one factory in Gaza, though they were unable to meet them in-person due to the restrictions between traveling from the West Bank.

Mijalli decided to move away from only working with a factory setup – instead expanding so that Nöl could work with women cooperatives and smaller, family-owned businesses. This also expanded to include other locals from apothecaries and spice shops for natural dye agents to family-run tailor shops.

From Nabulus to Jenin to Gaza to Bethlehem to Ramallah, and more, the team is spread out across Palestinian towns. “I design and I'm coordinating, but at the end of the day, these people that I work with are bringing it to life,” Mijalli said.

The intentional approach ties to the Collective aspect of the name, that it takes a village to bring everything together, and ties to the idea of Nöl (a loom) as individual threads that make something bigger.

Some traditional fashion conventions are simply not possible under occupation, such as creating and releasing collections at exact times of the year. However, Mijalli would not want to take this approach anyway.

In a 2021 TED Talk entitled The Sustainable Future Lies in Indigenous Tradition, she discussed the connection to a historical slower process that we can take note of:

“For generations, the West has invalidated and erased indigenous knowledge and ways of being. Knowledge which is deeply rooted in communication and active collaboration with Mother Nature. This type of relationship fostered a balance between us and the Earth...

It turns out that the world depends on this indigenous knowledge to protect a planet on the brink of disaster.

For example, traditional Palestinian embroidery is typically done in what we call Tatreez circles, in which embroiderers work together in a circle, often storytelling and singing, and each individual stitch is done by hand.

This means that some garments can take up to six months to complete. The garments often stay in our closets for decades, if not generations, passing from mother to daughter.”

In her TED talk, Mijalli also connects this to the excessive amount of clothing waste every year. According to the 2024 statistics, as much as 92 million tons of clothing currently ends up in landfills annually.

Along with this, she mentions the constant micro-collections that brands come out with, often as frequently as weekly. The same report from The Round Up offers other recent insights that include:

• Between 80 and 100 billion new clothing garments are produced globally every year, as of 2024.

• Textile production generates 42 million tons of plastic waste per year, making it the second-highest sector after packaging.

• Almost 60% of all clothing material is actually plastic. Synthetic fibers that have become ubiquitous in our wardrobes.

• Textiles and fashion waste account for 9% of annual microplastic pollution added to our oceans.

• Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.

• Only 1% of clothes will get recycled into new garments.

In a fashion industry that makes profit a priority over people or the planet, like many other capitalist fields, Nöl stand apart. The ethical, sustainable, hyperlocal, and intersectional process makes Nöl an example of how things could be.

The logistical production issues from Baby Fist did not go away either, of course. In an October 2021 interview for the Dardashe podcast, she said:

“Israel controls all the entry points and exit points. So if you want to move goods and services, it has to go through Israeli authority and approval. And usually for Palestinians in the West bank, they pay double the tax.

It's essentially like shipping out of two countries without even choosing to, it's just by force. For example, during Israeli holidays, if their country shuts down, like there's no postal service, it also affects us.”

Mijalli also deals with having to take alternate driving routes, which can take two or three times as long – whether it be driving on the apartheid roads (since others are not accessible to Palestinians), going through Israeli military checkpoints, or even sometimes having to switch over to a bus instead.

Beyond these logistical intrusions, there are other serious issues that arise.

“One of the producers we work with who makes our sewing patterns, his nephew was murdered. And understandably we stopped production,” Mijalli said. “I think when you're buying a garment, you don't necessarily stop to think about what someone is experiencing specifically in Palestine, but for people all over the world.”

With Nöl, part of the goal is to look at the people behind the clothing as humans, not machines. Instead, Nöl aims to bring the people behind the clothes a voice.

The results of the clothing, despite all of these obstacles, are a testament to Mijalli’s perseverance. You can see this in the designs of the beautiful pieces, from the shirts to the dresses.

Along the way, those who follow Nöl are welcomed with continuous education about the patterns, materials, and overall cultural traditions of Palestine.

This storytelling appears in different ways. The slides that appear throughout this page showcase her skill in graphic design, for example. Or videos, such as one recent example posted on Nöl’s Instagram to give insight behind the brand’s Fairouz t-shirt, which gives a history of the Lebanese singer’s connection to Palestine, or a video on one of of the women who helps craft their tatreez designs.

Mijali also aims to incorporate stories of everyone she works with so people can know the garments all have a story. With Nöl, that means a specific Palestinian reality with each person. This includes sharing behind the scenes images and information – often on Instagram Stories or feed posts – as she documents different parts of the production process.

She regularly spends hours with the women’s cooperative, which has helped Mijali better understand the history of different patterns, colorways, and fabric choices.

For the collective members who Mijalli works with, typically she meets every person before working together.

However, for the weavers she works with in Gaza, that again was not possible. Despite being only 50 miles apart, they talk over Whatsapp instead to communicate on process and designs.

Then, amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, their relationship took on a heightened role.

The families of two of Nol’s weavers – Hussam and Waleed Zaqout, brothers – were displaced amidst the bombardment.

Husam's home was destroyed and had nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors all martyred.

His brother, Waleed, later found himself struggling with a failing kidney and in need of an urgent transplant.

They were also trying to evacuate both families, including wife and children. However, the Hala Agency – who was helping to evacuate people to Egypt – was charging large fees.

Mijalli helped to lead a campaign to raise funds for their evacuation, and the efforts were successful, with over $100,000 raised.

Eight people between the families were eventually able to evacuate to Cairo in March 2024, though four other family members were not able to go.

In more recent months, they also started another campaign for Help Gaza Weavers Preserve Majdalawi Textiles. (Click to donate now to the GoFundMe campaign.)

A few months before this latest ongoing genocide, Mijalli had spoken to The Guardian for a July 2023 feature:

“The goal is to keep storytelling more than anything else. I think that, up until now, fashion, and the garments, have been the medium through which we’re telling our stories about the Palestinian people, about the land, about sustainability and what that looks like for non-Western people especially.”

Mijalli is also a talented photographer. She often shares images taken around Palestine on the Nöl account as a way to further give context and insight into the land and culture. (You can see more photos on her personal account, @simsim.jpeg)

Through clothes, photography, or any medium she chooses – it’s clear that Mijalli’s storytelling and highlighting of Palestinian culture is at the heart of everything she does.

Another quote from the 2023 feature in The Guardian was:

“I always say living here, it's like heaven and hell. It's this simultaneous, bittersweet state of being. You have the heaven of Palestine – like the people, our culture, our heritage, the land. It's heaven.

And then hell comes from the occupation and living… learning to live in a state of being where you're constantly experiencing both.”

As the conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank have continued to worsen since those comments, it has made every day life worse for all.

In the face of these conditions, Nöl has remained committed to taking care of its community, from fundraisers to highlighting the stories of the collaborators within the slower process of making clothes. Not many clothing brands could say they look out for their people in the same way.