FORTY YEARS OF TEL AVIV GLAMOUR, IN ONE ROOM

Every fashion capital has one designer who functions as its memory. In Tel Aviv, that designer is Yaron Minkowski. He graduated from the fashion department at Shenkar College around 1989 and had already been working in Israeli fashion since the mid-eighties. His first professional post was at the swimwear house Gutex, where he produced a collection called Jerusalem of Gold, a title that tells you most of what you need to know about his sensibility: unembarrassed, lyrical, and entirely willing to put a national anthem on a swimsuit. Early on he won Best Young Designer for eveningwear at an international fair in Dusseldorf. In 1991 he dressed Orna and Moshe Datz for Eurovision. In 2025 he marked forty years in fashion. What he actually makes is eveningwear, and what distinguishes it is an appetite for materials that have no business being in a gown. Minkowski has built collections using Bukharan textiles and, memorably, towels, set against silk that costs four hundred shekels a meter. His signatures are Indian embroidery worked into silk, textured Thai silk, lavender pleating, and geometric color blocking in yellow, green and orange, which he handles with the confidence of someone who stopped worrying about taste sometime in the previous century. There are Asian-influenced maxi dresses, slit columns, jewel tones with metallic finishes. His own summary of his handwriting, translated from the Hebrew, is characteristically dry: "In my handwriting there's always something very refined." The clientele has been, for decades, the most photographed women in Israel: Gal Gadot, Bar Refaeli, Moran Atias, Galit Gutman, Marina Maximilian Blumin, Orna Datz. For years the work was sold from a multi-level boutique and studio on northern Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, part atelier, part seasonal showroom, with a curated section for clients who preferred coverage to exposure, which is a quietly important detail for a designer arriving at a runway built around Jewish women of every degree of observance. He closed Dizengoff at the end of September 2019, in a wave of Israeli fashion closures, and the story of what happened next is the story of a lot of small houses. "Just before the pandemic, I decided it was time to fulfill dreams I hadn't managed to in the race of life," he told the Jerusalem Post. "I closed the studio, dreamed of traveling and creating art around the world, but the pandemic stopped everything. My clients didn't let me rest, and that brought me back to full activity." Today he works out of a studio in Jaffa on Yehuda Margoza Street. He showed at Israel Canada Tel Aviv Fashion Week in 2025. He has launched a limited bridal collection for brides, in his framing, who do not want to be like everyone else, priced to be reachable. He is developing a museum project in Jaffa for toys and iconic fashion, which is exactly the sort of thing a man with a forty-year archive eventually does. He has always been clear-eyed about th