NEW YORK — Rana Hajjar’s T-shirts spark political debate as well as knowing smiles. Some see them as canvas for elaborate graphic design.
Hajjar’s Ts are different because the names of international cities are written in Arabic across the front.
“I wanted to make Arabic hip, without being too ethnic,” Hajjar said over dinner in the East Village, near her home. “I wanted to try to find people like me who grew up in the Middle East, but were trying to find something cool and funky, from a design point of view.”
The shirts come in women’s, men’s and children’s styles. In what she has dubbed “The City Collection,” short- and long-sleeved Ts and tanks are available in green, orange and blue, and feature New York, Brooklyn, Dubai, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Beirut and London written in Arabic in Hajjar’s own hand.
“I wanted to modernize Arabic calligraphy,” she said. “It’s not at all traditional. People are attracted to a design.”
Hajjar put her graphic design skills to the test and created a updated form of the traditional script.
Her full-time job, however, is as an architect at a lower Manhattan firm specializing in commercial design. Late nights and weekends, she is the creative director of the Rana Hajjar collection.
Born in Beirut, Hajjar, 34, moved with her family to Dubai, where she spent her youth. Later, she moved to Montreal to study architectural design at McGill University.
“When you study design, you’re aware of everything,” Hajjar said. “You graduate a different person.”
Hajjar said architecture and fashion design share many similarities, among them, “the pursuit of simple, clean lines,” noting that designer Tom Ford has a degree in environmental architecture from Parsons School of Design.
In 1999, she moved to the U.S. and began her career as an architect. Last September, she had the idea to create a line of T-shirts as a way to acknowledge her roots. Initially, she sent a few shirts to friends, but then requests for more styles kept popping up. Hajjar was convinced to create a full line by her friend and now business partner Nicola Montrucchio who, like Hajjar, is an immigrant and first-generation New Yorker.
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“The world is changing,” said Montrucchio, a native of Turin, Italy. “You want to have something from your roots.”
Hajjar hopes that with Montrucchio’s help she will be able to take the company to the next level. Her collection, she said, will always have Arabic words or phrases on them, but she wants to expand it to include handbags, scarves and sexy tops adorned with Arabic poetry.
The collection is sold at the boutique Artez’n in Brooklyn and on the Web site ranahajjar.com. The wholesale price range of the collection is $12 to $18. Hajjar expects the firm’s wholesale volume this year to reach $100,000.
“The possibilities really are endless,” Hajjar said.