RIYADH — The season's most candid retrospective opened Sunday, August 31, 2025, in a blog post, "The Outfit Was Doing The Talking," in which local man Mishal Samman reviews his wardrobe and concludes it was "a costume": "a carefully curated billboard."

The first collection, late 80s to early 90s, is "all jeans and loud American T-shirts": wordplay, cartoons, sarcasm. The brief, in the designer's words: "I was dressing to not be seen as Saudi." The post names no cartoons. Kahn Sole of the Nerd Panel has submitted forty anyway.

Then the turning point. At the funeral of a distant relative, Mr. Samman wore a thobe, correctly, and "sprayed cologne like I was heading to a party." Someone pulled him aside, gently: "It's a funeral," they said. "Maybe... not the perfume." Fitz Chekk, fit-check columnist, scored it "thobe, ten; fragrance, dressed for a different event."

What stayed with him, he writes, was the line: "I realized I didn't even see the line I crossed." He wasn't trying to disrespect his culture, the post says; he "just hadn't claimed it." Auntie Climax, neighbourhood aunty, said she would have mentioned the cologne herself, "and the T-shirts, in 1989."

The current collection is mostly thobes, which are "easier when you've got a little extra around the middle." Asked whether this means he is eating properly, Auntie Climax said yes. The retrospective closes quietly: "for years, the outfit did the talking. Now? I'd rather just be heard."