When Shahd AlShehail began conceiving Abadia’s spring 2026 “Meditation” collection roughly eight months ago, she was not designing for a region in crisis. She was designing against the speed of fashion itself, and against a year of accelerating momentum that had brought her brand new retail doors, growing wholesale revenue and a positive EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, appreciation and amortization]. By the time the collection arrived at market in March, the calculus had shifted.

At the end of February, the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory missile and drone barrages across the Gulf had upended the region’s luxury narrative, shuttered airspace from Dubai to Doha and pushed many retailers into a defensive posture during what should have been peak Ramadan trading.

The collection’s thesis — deliberate slowness; garments framed as sanctuaries and heirlooms; sadu, the traditional Bedouin weaving craft of the Gulf translated through Abadia’s signature stacking — landed almost prophetically.

“It feels way too right for the moment,” AlShehail told WWD from Milan, where she was meeting fabric suppliers. “But I was feeling that way when we were creating this collection. It was such an exciting and huge momentum year for Abadia, and I was longing for the sense of connecting with our core and slowing down.”

The look book, shot in walnut-paneled interiors against Bauhaus-era furniture, leans more heavily into silk satin and fluid drape than past Abadia outings, with a bronze satin mini sitting alongside the floor-grazing volumes the brand is best known for. Sadu, however, remains the spine. AlShehail said retailers including Net-a-porter and Selfridges anchored their spring 2026 buys around the sadu pieces, a decisive shift from how international wholesale read the craft five years ago.

“It’s a real shift from the reaction to sadu being maybe too ethnic, or traditional,” she said. “Now seeing that, that is really what the retailers are gravitating towards, and it’s obviously what our customers want.”

Clients regularly request that sadu detailing be added to non-sadu pieces, she added.

That international pull is shaping Abadia’s near-term roadmap. The brand will execute a major U.K. expansion in June, adding Harrods and Browns to its existing wholesale footprint at Selfridges and on Net-a-porter. AlShehail said the U.K. and the U.S. have both emerged as notable growth markets, and the June launch became a rallying point for the team after Abadia canceled the majority of its planned regional activations in February and March.

“When we had to cancel the majority of the things we were doing in the region in February and March, it felt like a motivation for the team to kind of look forward to something quite concrete,” she said.

The conflict’s hardest operational hit, AlShehail said, was last-mile logistics, with Eid deliveries colliding head-on with global spring 2026 shipping. Abadia rerouted a portion of regional shipments from air to land, accepting longer transit times for delivery certainty. Fabrics sourced from Italy and Japan had already landed in the UAE before airspace closures, insulating production.

“Being a founder-led, agile brand helped,” she said. “We just moved with the punches and found creative ways of how to get things from point A to point B.”

With roughly 90 percent of manufacturing in Dubai and the brand’s Saudi-based artisan network largely unaffected, the supply chain proximity AlShehail has long prioritized became a buffer rather than a vulnerability.

AlShehail, who described herself as a child of the Gulf War — she was 4 during the 1991 invasion of Kuwait — said the priority was emotional safety, not just physical safety, particularly for her network of artisans and her team. The period also sharpened her conviction about what Abadia is being built for.

“This is the moment for us to be grounded,” she said. “We are building for a much bigger picture. It’s much longer term. We’re here to build a legacy brand, a 100-year brand. That’s what I want at the end of the day.”

The artisan side of the business was largely unaffected, AlShehail said. The community response, with brands and friends across the region opening doors and checking in on one another, reinforced her thinking on why the model matters.

Looking ahead, Abadia is beginning to develop production capacity in Saudi Arabia, leveraging a newly opened lab there to complement the brand’s Dubai-based manufacturing. AlShehail said her 2026 plans, including the U.K. launch and new fabric developments she is working on with Italian and Japanese mills, remain alive and active.

“Some adjustments are happening to our plans, for sure,” she said. “But we are very much still navigating and moving ahead. This is just a little bit of a diversion, maybe a bit of slowness, which we’ve been manifesting, I guess, in a way.”