There is a particular kind of light in Cairo just after the heat breaks, gold going amber against limestone that has stood for millennia, and for Fall/Winter 2026 Casablanca has built an entire collection around chasing it. The Parisian house, founded by Charaf Tajer in 2018, has titled its new campaign Carnet de Voyage, a travel diary lensed by photographer Theo Liu across the Egyptian capital. It arrives now, at the tail end of a summer when fashion has grown weary of the studio and hungry for somewhere real, and it answers that hunger by treating a city not as a backdrop but as the story’s leading character.
The premise is deceptively simple: follow a young traveler as she wanders Cairo, absorbing its contradictions. What Liu captures instead of postcards is the texture between the postcards. Shared meals at crowded tables, a fleeting glance exchanged across a market, the ordinary choreography of a city that has never once paused to be photographed. Building on his earlier work with the house in Japan, Liu brings a documentary eye that prizes imperfection over polish, and the images carry the grain of something witnessed rather than staged. Ancient landmarks sit shoulder to shoulder with café mornings and street corners, and the collision is the point.
That collision marks a deliberate pivot. Casablanca’s previous Egyptian chapter, its Pre-Fall 2026 campaign shot by Per Appelgren, leaned into virtual-production fantasy, constructed dunescapes and studio skies threaded with cosmology and cinematic nods to Death on the Nile. Carnet de Voyage keeps the same geography and abandons the myth-making entirely. The house frames the shift as a move from mythology and cosmology to lived experience, and you can feel the change in temperature. Where the earlier work dreamed of Egypt, this one simply walks through it.
The clothes hold their own against a backdrop that could easily swallow them. Casablanca’s signature color-gradient sets read like portable sunsets against the sandstone, while printed silk separates, sweeping full-length dresses, luxury swimwear, sportswear and jersey pieces inject a jolt of pop into every frame. The outerwear anchors on a Celestial Pyramid Wool Varsity Jacket, felted wool with leather sleeves and an embroidered motif carried over from the collection’s visual language, a piece that ties the house’s varsity codes to its Egyptian preoccupation. Waffle-stitch polos reworked in wool and cotton monogram knitwear round out the everyday register, and the recurring Tennis Club Icon T-shirt reappears across silk and jersey, that familiar Casablanca marriage of sport and travel.
The casting deepens the sense of a city met rather than borrowed. Models Lulu Wood and Rania Benchegra appear alongside Youssef Rocha and Mohamed Hassan and, crucially, locally cast Egyptian talents including Youssef Sharaf and Adhar Abiem. The result feels less like a conventional fashion lineup than a group of strangers who have wandered into the same frame somewhere between a real street and a movie set. It is exactly the tension the house has always mined, the place where reality and fantasy blur, and it is where Casablanca has always felt most itself.
There is a canniness to all of this that deserves acknowledging. Casablanca has spent seven years turning travel into a brand language, drawing on Tajer’s Parisian and Moroccan heritage while looking perpetually outward, and Cairo is the latest destination in a long itinerary. But Carnet de Voyage lands differently because it trades aspiration for immediacy. Whether you are actually booking the flight or simply romanticizing your Tuesday, the collection, live now on the brand’s website, offers the same proposition: that getting a little lost might be the whole point. In a season crowded with fantasy, Casablanca has made its most persuasive case yet for the real thing.
