The base is corduroy — a ridged, textured surface that holds embroidery differently than flat fabric, the ridges creating a subtle landscape beneath the needle. A hand-embroidered border runs the jacket's perimeter, worked in traditional motifs in dabka — metal wire embroidery — alongside tilla (gold thread), silk, and cotton thread, and pearls. The combination produces a border that reads as opulent without being decorative for its own sake: every material earns its place.

Corduroy is a working fabric — structured, resilient, associated with labour and academia equally. Embroidering its surface with pearl and tilla is the kind of thing that changes the object's entire register: it is still a corduroy jacket, but it is something else as well. That productive tension is where RASTAH operates.

A memoir is written after the fact, looking back at what happened with the clarity distance provides. The embroidery on this jacket carries the same quality — techniques that have been practised for generations, set down in their full complexity, preserved in the fibres of a garment that moves through the present.