Sumayyah Al Suwaidi, 30, was brought up in a conservative Emirati household. Growing up, she never thought she would become the popular personality that she is today. In just about a decade this artist, curator, fashion designer and entrepreneur has transformed the world around her by achieving each of her dreams — with just hard work and a deep-seated passion. Hailed as the first Emirati female digital artist, she is a boutique owner and a curator.
She started her career as an artist in 2001, opened Grafika in 2005 and transformed it to a boutique to promote some of the best fashion labels in the country in 2009. Sumayyah launched her own fashion line Seen this year and plans to start a food chain very soon. “I am not going to serve anything too healthy there,” she warns. “It will offer food for your soul, much beyond what healthy food can achieve. One should be cautious but also enjoy life; we must try to live happily ever after.”
She says it is a need to express her feelings that drives her to create so much. “Instead of writing a diary, I produce art or something creative. The result is sometimes a digital painting, a wearable piece of fashion or simply another idea that needs wings to fly,” she says.
“It’s after ten years of hard work that I can finally say I have achieved some of my goals but now I have bigger goals and hopefully in the next 20 years, my art will be displayed in museums across the world and my fashion line [Seen] be worn by some of the most famous people around the world,” she says. The artist is philosophical about the many unnoticed achievements from her past and says, “Looking back makes you restless and competitive. I see only one direction — the future.”
Sumayyah hopes Seen, her couture line of dresses and abayas, will represent the UAE like Versace does Italy. “Clothing makes a powerful statement. Seen believes in doing just that,” she says.
She is proud of her identity as an Emirati and is nostalgic about her public school and college days in the Emirate. “I have grown up in a very ordinary household of principles and togetherness. My family is very precious for me — my father, now retired, was the assistant undersecretary in the Ministry for Transportation and my mother is a housewife. I am close to my aunt who is the first Emirati woman to receive a scholarship to study in England in the 70s and the first Emirati female to work in an oil and gas company in 1984.”
Talking about the place of women in the UAE, Sumayyah doesn’t believe that Emirati women have to fight social hurdles. “It is normal for Emirati women to step out of their homes now and work or be on their own — it is just a wrong notion in the media that they are backward or something of that sort. The only thing applicable for every woman on the planet is the support of her family and friends — then she has absolutely nothing to worry about,” she says. That’s certainly the case for anyone approaching life the way this dynamic young woman does.
