For someone who claims to hate fashion, Xander Ghost sure has a funny way of showing it. In fact, he’s managed to build not one but two successful labels—first the cult eyewear brand ABETTERFEELING, and now BARRASERB, a fashion venture he co-founded with Egyptian rapper Marwan Pablo and stylist Amer. The irony isn’t lost on him either. He’ll tell you he prefers the word “product” over “fashion” and that the very word makes him “want to throw up.” Yet here we are, talking about a brand that’s quickly becoming one of the most talked-about names in Cairo’s underground street style scene since its launch in 2024.
The Cairo-born creative’s story doesn’t start with fashion. He began with music—DJing experimental techno in dimly lit clubs long before anyone knew his name. But music is a tough business to monetize, and like many artists of his generation, he pivoted toward creating products. ABETTERFEELING, launched in 2018, became an instant hit. Its futuristic sunglasses landed on everyone from Skepta and Rosalia to Billie Eilish and J Balvin, stocked in heavyweight retailers like SSENSE and HBX. The brand picked up design awards, too, proving that the Egyptian multihyphenate wasn’t just dabbling. He had a knack for building worlds around objects, creating something that felt less like an accessory and more like an identity marker. “I knew how to market a streetwear brand already,” he explains to MILLE. “It’s hype, it’s scarcity, it’s building a narrative. I’d done that before.” The difference, this time, is that BARRASERB wasn’t planned.
“It was super random,” he recalls. “Me and Marwan [Pablo] were just friends, talking. He was telling me his ideas, I was telling him mine. Then it was like, hold on—why don’t we just do it together?” Pablo had the name in his back pocket already, lifted from an old lyric. “Barraserb means outside the herd,” Xander, born Omar Taha, explains. “It’s slang. It’s about doing your own thing, being in your own lane.” At first, it was just a few t-shirts, shot properly but with zero expectations. “There was no team, no business plan. It was me, him, and Amer. And then from day one, sales were crazy. We were like, what the f***? Maybe this is legit.”
What sets BARRASERB apart is how they treat community as the core product. “I don’t even like the word streetwear,” Xander insists. “For me, it’s a lifestyle brand, even more than that—a community brand. We give back heavily. We give stuff for free. We do physical activations on the street. No one does that in Egypt.” He points out how class divides in Cairo mean celebrities often feel out of reach. BARRASERB flips that on its head. “We pull up with a bus or a car, drop the location a few hours before, and literally give away hundreds of t-shirts.”
Sometimes it’s not even about the clothes. They’ll host intimate listening parties where entry comes with a t-shirt purchase, which is cheaper than a concert ticket, but with the same communal rush. “We just want people to be part of it,” he says. “You don’t have to have a lot of money to belong here.” In a city where style often doubles as a signifier of privilege, that kind of accessibility feels almost radical.
It’s not performative philanthropy either, nor is it some neatly packaged CSR strategy or a clever hook for marketing copy. The ethos is closer to the earliest days of streetwear, when brands like Pyrex Vision or early VLONE were selling more than cotton tees, but entry into a world that felt real, raw, and built for kids who weren’t being let in anywhere else.
That’s why BARRASERB feels so different: they’re literally taking streetwear back to the streets. The friends are bringing that democratic energy once embodied by Virgil Abloh, Shayne Oliver, and that whole Been Trill era to Egypt, a landscape where fashion has been flattened into Instagram-ready campaigns and “drops” that look identical. The brand’s messier, more human approach feels closer to the origins of streetwear. For the trio, the motivation is simple: “It makes people happy. That’s the main thing,” Xander says simply.
And then, of course, there are the clothes themselves. Rough-edged, graphic-heavy, and a little unpolished on purpose. Oversized sweatshirts, work jackets airbrushed with spectral graphics, t-shirts printed in jagged lettering, technical trousers collapsing into heavy sneakers. The styling leans raw and almost improvised: layered socks, bandaged limbs, oversized silhouettes that feel both utilitarian and theatrical. What’s striking is that none of this has been rolled out in a slick campaign. Most of the visuals are scrappy shoots in blank studios, or even selfies and livestreams.
The growth has been staggering. In just its second year, the brand recorded a 1,000% jump in sales. Each drop, often announced spontaneously, pulls in five figures. For context, these aren’t glossy, seasonal collections. They’re random, sometimes conceived the night before, designed around whatever the founders are obsessed with at the moment—cars, electrical equipment, you name it. And while some concept-heavy pieces flop, the most unpolished designs sometimes blow up. One drop Xander sketched last-minute outsold their most elaborate collaboration fifty times over. “It was trash in my opinion,” he says casually. “But it blew the f*** up. Fifty times more than our big collab with NMR.CC, who worked on Travis Scott’s Utopia.” He laughs. “Why? I don’t know. I could come up with some b******* answer, but I don’t know.”
The business model itself reflects that pragmatism. They run on a pre-order system to avoid stock risks, producing locally in Egypt and reinvesting directly into their community. It’s scrappy but smart. “Stock is your enemy,” Xander muses, a lesson he learned the hard way with his first label back in 2014. By keeping production local, they not only support factories and fabric suppliers but also create a homegrown ecosystem that resists the default of importing foreign labels.
Relatability seems to be the secret. With no time to shoot a campaign, Xander once went live trying on the clothes himself. “I was like, bro, we’re not gonna sell off mock-ups. So I just wore it. People asked me, how tall are you, how does it fit? It was hilarious. People prefer seeing clothes on a normal person, not a model.” The stream felt intimate, interactive—even clumsy. And that, somehow, worked better than anything polished. They’re already planning activations in Paris, Milan, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia. “We know we have an audience there,” Xander says matter-of-factly. “We just have to show up.”
But for all the momentum, he resists making it too commercial. “I’m a niche guy. I like niche. The trick is making it survive financially but still have a longer life cycle. That’s my specialty—understanding why brands live or die. Nothing just happens. There’s always a catalyst.”
Of course, clout plays a role. Pablo’s name guarantees attention. “Everything’s about clout,” Xander says bluntly. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But you can’t give people b*******. The visual representation has to be unique. People need to feel it’s real.” They’ve resisted traditional PR and influencer seeding, preferring to let the clothes circulate organically.
That attitude reflects his own complicated relationship with style. “I actually think fashion is lame now,” he admits. “Globally, not just Egypt. It’s full of clowns. People wear costumes, they flex, but there’s no personal style anymore.” He’s nostalgic for past eras, when individuality mattered more. “Show me your archive. Pinterest can’t save you. Anyone can have a good Pinterest now. Even AI can do it for you.”
He often quotes Yoji Yamamoto’s minimalist advice or laughs about Rick Owens’ suggestion that the best styling tip is simply to go to the gym. His own wardrobe, he admits, is pared down to near-uniform levels: black pants, plain hoodies, and a rotation of old tees. Which is ironic, considering he’s shaping what the next generation of Egyptian youth might end up wearing.
“I swear to God, I’m uninterested. Fashion is lame,” he reiterates. And yet, he, alongside his co-founders, are building something that feels more alive than most of what’s out there. Sure, sometimes it feels more like a social experiment than a brand, but maybe that’s why it works. “People connect to what we’re doing,” he states. “That’s real.”
Main image photographed by Eyad Essam
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