Barraserb is what happens when three creatives set out to start separate clothing brands and end up building one together instead. There is no extraordinary origin story behind how they met or how the brand came together. It is the usual ‘a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy’ tale, except that one of them happens to be one of Egypt’s biggest rap names.
It was Marwan Pablo who met Xander Ghost, musician and founder of eyewear brand ABETTERFEELING, and stylist Amer Mubarak on separate occasions before connecting them together. Exactly when or where these introductions happened remains a little hazy, and perhaps inconsequential enough that neither Xander nor Amer can quite recall the details.
‘So that was in London. No, no, no, we met in Cairo. No, actually, we met in Dubai, right?’ Xander attempts to piece together the story in real time, looking to Amer for confirmation, only to find that he is just as uncertain about how the three first crossed paths.
‘You know the saying “no new friends”? With us, it’s like, only new friends,’ Xander jokes. ‘But I guess this was the birth. It wasn’t really planned as a proper business or anything.’
This is precisely what gives the brand its appeal. In today’s economy, where businesses can capitalise on fan bases and music-world notoriety, a brand like Barraserb has plenty of capital to exploit and mythologies to manufacture. But it does neither.
‘We said let’s just do stuff that we would wear, you know? and then we just literally dropped out of nowhere,’ says Amer, ‘People even thought it was an album when we first teased the brand.’
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Granted, the brand gained attention from Pablo’s involvement, but the intention is for the business to stand independently of his releases, streams and public appearances, so today Pablo takes the back seat when it comes to the brand’s front-facing image, and enjoys working in the shadows. There is a refusal to associate with an artist’s persona too strictly. Rather than becoming a merchandise line, they want Barraserb to operate as its own machine.
This became evident when the first collection dropped, engaging with techwear and functional gorpcore instead of a streetwear drop you’d expect of a clothing brand co-founded and co-managed by a rapper.
Like an album you understand only when looking back at, the drop was successful but confusing to the consumers at first glance. ‘Three months after the drop, people were going to Pablo asking him, like, “We want this stuff.” even if at first they weren’ t interested’ Amer recalls.
‘But we were prepared and ready to lose money for the first three years. We knew the product was ahead of its time. Having worked on my other brands, I also know it takes time to gain commercial momentum,’ Xander explains.
Ironically, the brand garnered attention and profit from year one, but this is part of why Xander believes the regional hip-hop artists aren’t engaging in clothing ventures like they do in the West.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, many streetwear brands on shop shelves were founded by rappers. Think Rocawear, Sean John and Apple Bottoms. Today, there’s Yeezy by Ye, AWGE by A$AP Rocky and many more.
Artists may have the audience and the creative vision, but running a brand requires a different set of skills and a willingness to commit to the less glamorous work behind the scenes. The appeal of receiving a fee for a performance can be much more immediate than investing time and money into a business that may take years to mature.
The long-term reward, however, is the possibility of building an independent intellectual property rather than relying exclusively on a career whose commercial momentum can shift overnight. In a fast-moving music scene, where audiences are constantly discovering the next artist, that independence becomes particularly valuable.
This is why Barraserb is not built on brand strategy alone, but also on experimentation that can often feel bleak, existential and tinged with a certain sadness. As the brand evolved, they released a collection of graphic T-shirts where the mundane emotions of daily life take the place of motivational talk that brands, artists, and everyone with a platform has rehearsed to speak.
‘We have real feelings,’ Xander says. ‘For us, these are actual moods we go through. For example, the T-shirt that reads “The final goal is disappearance” is based on a sentence I had written in my notebook one morning.’
In a cultural landscape often dominated by carefully managed online personas, that directness has its own appeal and relatability. Social media encourages everyone to present a version of themselves that is thriving, productive and perpetually optimistic. But that image can feel disconnected from the experiences of young people in the region facing unemployment, financial uncertainty and an increasingly difficult path towards personal independence.
But Barraserb doesn’t want to delve too deep into that, either. It is not a fear of commitment but a belief in the multidimensionality of a person. Remember, the goal is clothes they’d want to wear on desperate days or motivated days getting ready to go on a hike, days spent in Cairo or London, or Dubai and clothes to fit the body type of the three founders who model the silhouettes based on.
Like the label’s founders, the brand has to remain multifaceted, ever-changing, quietly worldly and not necessarily traceable to a singular country or genre, and without having to explain itself too much, which perhaps explains the brand’s new line BRSRB LIFEWEAR that just launched.
Rather than replacing the label’s graphic collections, often designed in Arabic, BRSRB LIFEWEAR introduces a more accessible, functional range designed for everyday use. Waterproof and wind-resistant outerwear, jackets, coats, tracksuits, T-shirts and hoodies, with an emphasis on quality, considered cuts and pricing that allows more people to participate, rather than relying exclusively on limited graphic drops produced in small quantities.
Although not many brands coming out of the region have focused on functional wardrobe, Barraserb doesn’t believe in these competitions.
‘I hate this word “local”, I’ve never heard it anywhere in the world except in the region.’ Xander explains the need for a garment that speaks for itself, without needing to be concerned with honorary firsts or titles.
In many ways, the new line brings the label back to its original premise: clothes made to be worn, not simply admired on a mood board or bought as a souvenir of an artist’s cultural moment. It mirrors, almost literally, the brand’s first drop that was lost on many people before they demanded it be brought back.
The trio is revisiting the everyday clothing that inspired them in the first place, with a clearer understanding of what it takes to bring it to market. That understanding doesn’t have to be spelled out.
The label is not trying to manufacture a grand narrative about regional fashion or promise that every creative instinct will translate into commercial success. It is simply making things its founders believe in, building the infrastructure to sustain them and leaving room for the unexpected.
The ambition is not to become a local brand that happens to make it internationally, but a brand that makes what it wants, wherever it wants to be. And if the clothes connect with people along the way, then there are no complaints.
Pop Culture Editor-At-Large at Complex MENA.
