With a collection of clothing run up by hand in his Jersey City apartment, Tawfik Mounayer is shaking up fashion.

There was plenty of pseudo-Arabic flavor in the air during New York's fall fashion week: Miguel Adrover did turbans; Yeohlee showed veils and harem pants. Nice clothes, but none of them any match for the Middle Eastern spread backstage at Tawfik Mounayer's show–a buffet of hummus, babaghanouj, and tabbouleh whipped up by the designer's Palestinian father.

The food, though, was the only hint of the souk at Mounayer's impressive debut. Fashion may be embarking en masse on some sort of road trip to Riyadh, but the 25-year-old Jaffa-born, Upstate New York-bred designer has decided not to go along for the ride. "I don't want to be a selfish designer who does a burlap sack just to be artful," he says when the topic of djellabas on the runway arises." I want women to look beautiful and feminine and sexy in my clothes."

And so they did-and not just the models. Mounayer's friends, an extended family of fellow Parsons grads, also sported his designs as they helped set up the chairs, make last-minute alterations to the sweaters, and dress the models. The show was a group effect in all ways except one: Mounayer sewed nearly every piece of the 25-look collection by hand, from the satin-lined cape of antique velvet moiré (so well worn that it felt almost like terry cloth) to the high-necked Victorian-meets-early-eighties-Gunne Sax dress constructed from a Battenberg-lace tablecloth that he found at an estate sale and then stained with coffee in his bathtub.

The show was a success-retail interest, press clamoring for interviews, Mounayer's father in tears over just how beautiful it all was-but two weeks later, the modest designer was sounding a bit shell-shocked. "It seems like just yesterday I was making Barbie clothes out of tissues," he said with wonder. "And now I'm being interviewed for Vogue." -J.C.