‘Z-Too’: Designers, Models, and Mothers Face Threats, Doxxing Over Their Pro-Palestine Views
Fatima Bhutto speaks to over 10 women in the fashion world who have been harassed, threatened with rape and death, and blacklisted for speaking out against Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Najeeba Hayat, a 34-year-old footwear designer and brand consultant, was heading to a protest at Kuwait’s parliament house one morning in October 2023 when she started noticing her Instagram notifications were going off. Hayat, who founded her luxury shoe brand Liudmila in 2013, described by Vogue as “something out of a fairy tale or Marie Antoinette’s closet,” featured by Rihanna’s Fenty campaigns, and worn by Bella Hadid, had been in the trenches of social media hate before. She had made viral videos on Kuwait’s MeToo movement and other political topics, but this was different. It was worse than viral, moving so fast she would blink to find thousands of furious comments. It wasn’t stopping or slowing down, but mushrooming out of control. That’s when Hayat realized she had been “Z-too’ed” as she describes it, subjected to a Zionist troll attack and unsuccessful doxxing campaign.
She had recently posted a video about Dodo Bar Or, an Israeli designer who shared a reel cobbled out of the movie Independence Day, after October 7: Protesters shout ‘Free, free Palestine’ until a spaceship plays the Muslim call to prayer right before detonating massive explosions that kill everyone while targeting a building with the EU, French, and UK flags. “The message was ‘the West is next,’” Hayat remembers, “because that’s the narrative Israel has: that Islam is some rapacious beast that’s out to destroy the West, as if that’s not what the West has done to us for the past 500 years.” Hayat, outraged by Or’s Islamophobia, made her own video.
“Matches, My Theresa girlies, Net a Porter VIPS,” she shouted out the online shopping platforms, “especially Harrods turbo shoppers, Moda bulk buyers, this is your time to shine.” In a call to action, Hayat spoke to all the high-net-worth shoppers who followed her thanks to her shoe brand, women who regularly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury ecommerce sites: “feel free to let them know what they think about one of their brands pushing out vile, dangerous, r*cist propaganda.” The shoppers, many of them despairing and feeling hopeless, watching Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, understood that this was something they could do. They apparently sent a deluge of texts to their personal shoppers as well as to the e-commerce platforms, saying they wouldn’t spend a cent unless Or was removed. “The biggest platforms took her off,” Hayat tells me. Net-a-Porter went so far as to say that “Discrimination, hate, and violence have no place on our platforms.”
But Or’s clothing was reinstated on the shopping sites within days. She said in a statement on Instagram: “I had not realized this warning video was led by the voice of Adhan [the Muslim call to prayer] in the background, I did not mean to offend anyone by that.” The majority of Or’s statement, however, was spent regurgitating Israeli talking points. (Mytheresa reportedly said in a statement at the time that it made the decision to bring back the brand after the original post was removed and “context was given in the meantime by the designer.” Net-a-Porter did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)
A counter campaign of harassment against Hayat then began.