Youssef Zogheib - 2025 Festival d'Hyères Winner - BFA Fashion Design

Youssef Zogheib, a 2024 BFA Fashion Design graduate from Parsons Paris, was awarded the Prix Publique de la Ville d’Hyères at the 40th annual Festival d’Hyères. Congratulations! "Drawing on John Topham’s censored 1940 photographs of Royal Air Force soldiers crossdressing before battle in the town of Gravesend, this eponymous collection explores male tenderness and fantasy suppressed by the war machine. It challenges systems of martial discipline and militarized masculinity by queering the uniform—recasting it from an instrument of domination, hierarchy, and control into a space for softness, contradiction, and resistance. Growing up in Beirut, Youssef Zogheib was exposed to the military from an early age—his father served as an officer in the Lebanese armed forces. Through GRAVESEND, he uses fashion to examine how patriarchal societies archive, censor, and erase certain expressions of masculinity in order to construct, regulate, and enforce a narrow ideal of manhood.”