Meet Tali Marjieh: Arab Fashion’s Next Rebel Designer

As someone who's spent years reporting on the region's music scene, I've known about Elyanna since she first blew up. What always fascinated me wasn't only her voice or her meteoric rise, it was her tour wardrobe.

Each performance feels like theatre. Meticulously styled yet emotionally raw, fusing choreography, visuals and music into one huge spectacle. Few Arab artists have nailed that alchemy. Elyanna has, shaping the kind of live performance standard Western pop icons like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé perfected long ago.

Her costumes are opulent and deeply symbolic, as you can see in the delicate lace and in the keffiyeh folded into a crown. Statement pieces that look as if they've been plucked from a couture house as much as a grandmother's heirloom chest.

By pure coincidence, or obsessive stalking, sue me, I discovered that these looks aren't helmed by designer conglomerates or pulled from showrooms. They're imagined, stitched and perfected in a cramped LA studio and a local tailor's shop by her sister and creative co-conspirator, Tali Marjieh.

Tali isn't only the architect behind Elyanna's looks. She has also been brewing that on-the-road sorcery into a label of her own, MARTAL: streamlined, rave-coded, minimal fabric, a bit rebellious, almost grungy, very much giving baddie vibes.

After months of following her chaotic studio Instagram stories, where she'd share her design process on the road, I finally reached out. Partly because I needed to unpack the duality at the heart of her work, how she pieces together such intricate, whimsical designs for her sister while running a label on the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, all without an army of craftsmen. Partly because my inner Devil Wears Prada alter ego wanted an excuse to live out my fashion journalist fantasy. Either way, I had to try.

When we speak, Tali is between tour stops with Elyanna, still finding time to check in and share snippets of life on the road. "I've been having the craziest months," she tells me.

Her aesthetic for MARTAL could read like Arab futurism. The way I see it, it's very brat-core, something I imagine Charli XCX and her entourage would wear. It's stripped down, conceptually and literally, serve-maxxing silhouettes in bold fabrics and cuts, embellished with gold.

"There are a lot of limitations when it comes to performance wear. With MARTAL, I wanted to create ready-to-wear breezy pieces," Tali told SceneStyled.

"It is about spicy Arab girls living abroad, looking for designs and colours that remind them of home, like gold."

Gold runs through everything MARTAL does, and for Tali it isn't decorative shorthand. It's a token of her Arab roots, the element that turns up in weddings, dowries, household talismans and trinkets, reworked for a generation who grew up between cultures.

"The Arab heritage brings me so much inspiration, and its future gives me hope and motivation. They go hand in hand," she says.

For all the elaborateness of the designs, Tali's path doesn't follow the glossy arc of a traditional fashion designer. She didn't study in Paris ateliers or climb the ranks at a luxury house. She built her craft out of necessity, to fill a gap.

When Elyanna first started performing, the team struggled to find pieces or a stylist who could understand her vision and actually represent her.

"We were put in a situation where we had to create her looks ourselves. I had zero knowledge about showrooms, stylists or brands at the time, so I went to a local fabric store near me, then to the tailor next door, and it all started from there."

On tour, she handcrafts multiple ensembles, transforming Elyanna through a set of characters. Angel, warrior, baddie, all with an effortless flair that matches the emotional arc of the music onstage, in costumes that look deceptively designer to anyone who isn't behind the scenes.

MARTAL isn't a vanity project or an extension of Elyanna's world. Tali wants it to work as a launching pad for emerging and often overlooked talent from the Arab diaspora, and on tour she's always scouting young creatives and fashion students to collaborate with.

"The whole idea behind what we do is to open doors for designers, people in music and young creatives," she says.

She's anti-gatekeeping to a fault, bringing people into her studio chaos, sharing patterns, workspace and production know-how, building an ecosystem that pushes Arab aesthetics into contemporary wardrobes rather than museum vitrines.

She has moved from backstage hero with no cape and ad-hoc tailor to a full designer and stylist steering looks for festival stages and sold-out shows in New York and at Wembley. It's a rapid apprenticeship of a kind the global fashion industry rarely allows.

She still frames herself as a student, though. A business student, as she puts it, "touring with my sister and building my own brand along the way."

"With such visibility comes a huge responsibility," she says. For Tali, representing her Palestinian roots isn't an aesthetic choice; it's an inherent part of her conscience.

She recalls something Elyanna said to her right before she took the stage at Coachella, which still gets her through the overwhelming days.

"If I'm the first Arab to do something, it doesn't mean it's enough. It means we have to work extra hard to amplify the voice of our culture and our people."

For all the praise the sisters get, the criticism comes too. "Some outfits, especially those built as a performance extension of a song, are controversial for others," Tali says.

The ruptures are deliberate, meant to provoke conversation as much as admiration, and she's unromantically pragmatic about the friction. "Most of Elyanna's looks are controversial to others. We show a different perspective that some might relate to, and some simply don't like or accept. But we're fine with that."

She brushes it off so nonchalantly I found myself quietly wondering whether she's a Capricorn. It's a posture that understands exactly how high the stakes get when fashion becomes a language of identity.

For now MARTAL is a young and mercurial empire in the making, a distillation of everything Tali has learned on the road. She wants people to be choosing it years from now, and to let it mean whatever they need it to mean.

"I'm still new with MARTAL, so I'll let them choose the legacy and the feeling they want to take from it. But I do want them to understand that Arabs are maximalists when it comes to clothes, and we love it."