At the Border of What’s Possible
“Just hand me your passport,” the taxi driver said at the border between Beirut and Syria. “I’ll be right back.” It took thirty minutes. In that time, I counted nearly twenty nods from soldiers carrying AK-47s. Guns, military vehicles—everywhere I looked, more than I had ever seen. When he returned, nothing was said. Everything was apparently in order. We crossed. After all those armed glances, I had expected tension; instead, we simply drove through.
Hours passed with Islamic music playing softly in the background, heightening the sense of distance from anything familiar. Gradually, the landscape shifted. Abandoned towns. Bullet-ridden walls. Collapsed roofs. The occasional stray dog. It was immediately clear: people hadn’t left by choice; they had been pushed out by war. This continued for four long hours, until Aleppo.
And then, a rupture. A four-star hotel, part of a UAE chain—spa, gym, an abundant breakfast. An oasis. After the devastation along the road, the contrast felt almost unreal. Even the details stayed with me: gratinated eggplant, baba ganoush, pomegranate seeds.
Two hours later, I was picked up by Aladdin—my co-founder Mohamad Shami’s brother-in-law—and Yaman, his translator. Their expressions said enough: brief glances, a quiet disbelief that someone from the Netherlands had come here to build something together. Even the hotel staff watched from behind the glass. To them, I had arrived from another world. In some ways, it felt true.
They took me to the Shami family for dinner. A warm welcome, generous, immediate. The food, the atmosphere—it was my first real encounter with Syria beyond what I had seen on the road. It felt like the beginning of something meaningful.
The days that followed moved between conversations and time spent at the HKM atelier, where our first collections are being made. The hospitality was constant, but the tone shifted whenever I spoke about the future. It felt distant to them—abstract, almost unreachable. Years of war had eroded that sense of continuity. When I mentioned long-term plans, they nodded politely, but without conviction. They wished it for me, not for themselves. Sometimes a single look was enough to understand.
It’s difficult to describe what that does to you. In the Netherlands, we speak easily about five- or ten-year plans. Here, even imagining that far ahead felt like a privilege. It reframed everything—what security means, what stability allows, what we take for granted without noticing.
And yet, their resilience was undeniable. The atelier, rebuilt after the war, had no windows, no heating—conditions that would be unthinkable at home. Still, they had been working there for years. Their garments filled shops in the city center. What I saw there wasn’t just survival; it was persistence with intent. A desire to rebuild, to create, to reconnect with a world that once knew their work.
One afternoon, watching them work in the cold, focused and precise, it became clear: this is what the brand stands on. Not an idea, but people. Not a story, but reality.
I’ll leave it there, except for this: the friendships that formed in those four days—with Aladdin, with Yaman. In a world that often feels divided, that kind of connection feels rare. Maybe it was Aladdin’s humor, or Yaman’s curiosity. Maybe something simpler. Either way, it stays.
