As The MESTOUR Method concludes at M7, Keeta’s five-day journey through fashion, food and artistic expression offers a rather compelling reminder of what happens when different creative worlds meet.
A Keeta delivery jacket finding its way into a high-fashion editorial, accompanied by a magnificent cascade of Diana Ross-esque curls, was hardly among the things one might have anticipated for 2026. But fashion has always had a rather delicious habit of finding beauty in the unexpected, of taking the familiar and placing it somewhere entirely unfamiliar, until its original purpose becomes almost secondary to the story it begins to tell. And somewhere between the theatrical volume of the hair, the unapologetic colour of the jacket and Ilham Mestour’s extraordinary understanding of form, an everyday uniform found itself speaking an altogether different sartorial language.
The result was wonderfully excessive, a little irreverent and precisely the sort of visual audacity that makes fashion interesting in the first place.
The image, photographed by Karima Maruan, emerged from an unlikely meeting of creative disciplines during The MESTOUR Method, an exclusive five-day hairstyling programme held at M7 in Msheireb Downtown Doha from October 11–15, with Keeta joining as hospitality partner. What began as an opportunity to bring Doha’s food and beverage community into a space dedicated to artistic education eventually found its way into a fashion portrait.
At the centre of it all was Ilham Mestour, the internationally acclaimed artistic director whose nearly three decades in the fashion industry have taken her from backstage at major runway shows to the pages of international fashion publications. Her approach to hair has always extended beyond the conventional understanding of hairstyling, treating it instead as a discipline concerned with architecture, movement, texture and the extraordinary possibilities of the human silhouette.
Over five days, professional hairstylists who had travelled from Paris, London, Amsterdam, the United States and beyond gathered at M7 to explore that philosophy firsthand. Each session unfolded through Mestour’s demonstrations of intricate constructions and unconventional forms, before participants attempted their own interpretations under her guidance. There were moments of technical precision, certainly, but also the freedom to experiment, question established methods and discover how individual instinct might transform something familiar into something entirely new.
And perhaps it was only fitting that this spirit of experimentation eventually extended beyond the workshop itself. For the concluding fashion image, Mestour found inspiration in an object that belonged to an altogether different world: the distinctive Keeta jacket, a familiar sight on Doha’s streets, reimagined through the visual language of high fashion.
“The Keeta jacket was my starting point, taking something you see every day and showing it in a fashion context,” explains Mestour. “The bold colours, the volume of the hair and her confidence brought it all together. Keeping the background simple gave her space to own the frame. She draws you in and holds your attention.”
The image was the result of several creative hands coming together. Raja Azzi, a Lebanon-based hairstylist working across the Middle East and Africa, and Oby, a Doha-based hairstylist from The Alexs Hair Collection, worked on the elaborate hairstyle, while makeup artist Sakshi Tejpaul brought the beauty look to life. Mestour herself completed the final hair touches and finishing on Khadijah Amusat, bringing the individual elements into a cohesive visual statement, captured through Maruan’s lens.
The hair was deliberately extravagant, a glorious arrangement of bouncy curls and sculptural volume reminiscent of the unapologetic glamour of Diana Ross. Against the jacket’s bold colour and practical construction, it created a contrast that felt almost instinctively fashionable: softness against structure, theatricality against utility, the everyday against the extraordinary.
“I wanted the hair to feel powerful but still soft and playful, full of life, with bouncy curls, movement and confidence,” says Mestour.
There is, of course, a longer history to fashion’s fascination with transforming ordinary objects into extraordinary propositions. Uniforms have wandered onto runways, workwear has been elevated into luxury and garments once defined entirely by function have found themselves reinterpreted through the imagination of designers and artists. The appeal lies not necessarily in the object itself, but in the creative audacity of seeing it differently.
What made the moment at M7 particularly interesting, however, was that it had grown out of a collaboration whose original purpose was not fashion imagery at all.
Throughout the five-day programme, Keeta brought together a selection of its restaurant partners to curate the hospitality experience, extending the warmth of Doha’s food culture to an international gathering of creative professionals. Morning coffee came courtesy of Blackout Coffee, while freshly baked croissants from Nawar’s Bakery, a homegrown business founded by Qatari female entrepreneur, accompanied the early sessions. Cheese platters from Trays, alongside meals and sweet indulgences from Nando’s Qatar, Calify, Papa Johns and B Laban and other participating merchants, brought different flavours into the workshop as the days unfolded.
Beyond the food itself, the collaboration introduced local restaurant businesses to an international creative audience, allowing them to become part of an environment that might otherwise have remained entirely within the worlds of fashion and beauty.
For Keeta, the intention was to contribute to the experience without needing to occupy its centre, recognising that there is considerable value in being present where ideas are exchanged, relationships are formed and different communities encounter one another.
“More than anything, we wanted to share the same space as these remarkable creative minds who had travelled to Doha from around the world, and extend the warmth and generosity of Qatari hospitality to them,” says a Keeta Qatar spokesperson. “M7 was the right environment for our restaurant partners to become part of a wider cultural conversation. What Ilham created with the Keeta jacket was particularly meaningful because she understood something about our identity and translated it into her own creative language. It was bold, resilient and full of character. We came into this collaboration to support the people behind the creativity, and seeing that exchange develop into something so unexpected made it all the more special.”
For Mestour, that relationship between artistic expression and the people who make it possible sits at the very heart of her method.
“For me, The Mestour Method brings together care, culture, protocol and craft: how we look after people, the stories we bring, how we work and what we create,” she explains. “Keeta took such good care of the people behind the creativity. This image celebrates what that care makes possible.”
It is an observation that gives the photograph a rather different dimension.
For Keeta, the collaboration also continues a growing engagement with the creative communities shaping Doha. Earlier this year, the brand worked with Qatari artist Mubarak Al Thani on We Are Doha, an artistic interpretation of the city’s architecture, movement and everyday life, created as part of its first anniversary in Qatar. At M7, that conversation moved into another discipline altogether, with fashion and hairstyling providing an entirely different perspective on the familiar.
Fashion, after all, has never been particularly interested in staying where it belongs. Its most compelling moments often arrive when the boundaries between disciplines begin to blur, when the ordinary is reconsidered and when someone has the imagination to see possibility in something everyone else has stopped noticing.
