Azza Fahmy
Jewelry designer
Azza Fahmy is an Egyptian woman pioneer of jewelry design. In the interview, she traced her career journey, from learning jewelry design under the tutelage of Khan al-Khalili’s jewelers and goldsmiths, towards launching a number of stores in her name, and becoming one of the world’s most famous jewelry designers. Azza loved reading and culture in general, and took part in numerous exhibitions.
Azza was born in Sohag governorate, in Upper Egypt, where her father was serving as the director of a cotton export company preparing the Egyptian cotton for exportation to England. Azza’s father had a dual nationality, being born to an Egyptian father, and a Sudanese mother. Azza’s mother was an Egyptian homemaker with Turkish descents. Azza had a very happy childhood with her two brothers and her younger sister, and attributed this happiness to her father’s intellect and progressiveness, and the multinational diversity of the community working in Upper Egypt at the time, with English, Greek, and people of other nationalities. Azza loved reading, particularly politics and history books. She was fascinated with culture at a very young age, given her father’s keenness to reading to her every night, whether in English or in Arabic. She accredited the building of her character to her father’s devotion to her intellectual development, and his great impact on her life. Azza lived in Suhag until the age of 13, and attended Suhag’s Primary School, then Suhag’s Preparatory School, before the death of her father, and the family’s subsequent relocation to Cairo.
In Cairo, Azza resided in the city of Helwan, which she described as “a conservative Cairene society, not the typical Cairo. It is a traditional community of families that knew one another. All my father’s side of the family are Helwanis.” Azza attended Helwan’s Secondary School, and made many friends at this stage, recounting, “we used to ride our bicycles up to Helwan’s Observatory, then come back down. Helwan was a beautiful city, and the families were lovely.” After graduating high school, Azza had the chance to choose between studying commerce or fine arts for her university education, and decided to attend the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Upon her college graduation in 1966, Azza was appointed at the State’s Information Service Agency, where she worked until 1976. She described this stage of her life saying, “I was appointed in the second half of the 1960s. This was a boiling point in Egypt’s history. It was the time of Nasserism and the War, and I was responsible for the political bulletins published by the Agency. Of course, there was an enormous wave of nationalism, with the speeches delivered by Abd al-Nasser, and the songs performed by Abd al-Halim Hafez. We are the sixties generation.”
Azza enjoyed her work at the Agency, and mastered it the same way she perfected any job assigned to her. She explained, “I seek perfection in everything. When I do something, I like it to be flawless. I do not like it when people make mistakes at work. However, working at the Agency was not the job I wanted to do for life. That is why I was always on the lookout for something else, illustrating children’s books, and working in pottery, until I found jewelry.”
A book inspired Azza to enter the field of jewelry design, as she recounted, “one day I came across a book that changed my life. It was about jewelry in the European Middle Ages.” The book cost 19 Egyptian pounds at a time when she had limited finances, but she insisted on buying it because she had a feeling that jewelry design was the field of work meant for her. However, she had to overcome her first obstacle, which was finding a way into the field, especially that she wanted to design and create the jewelry with her own hands. At first, she sought information and training at the Faculty of Applied Arts, then decided to study the ‘craft’ under the people who actually do it. As Azza put it, “I thought about it. The people who work in crafts, the carpenters for example, do they go and study carpentry? No. The chief carpenter teaches the junior. The junior asks the chief how to build a cabinet, and the chief teaches the junior how to do it. So, I should be a junior. I will find a chief jeweler and work as his junior.”
Azza began the journey of finding a jeweler who would teach her, until her friend recommended one of the jewelers she knew, who immediately agreed to teach Azza. Recalling her first day, Azza said, “the first day I spent in Ramadan’s workshop, I arrived at three in the afternoon, and went home at eleven. I was walking on air…I felt it back then that a path just opened up for me, and that this path would lead me somewhere. I will be someone. It was fate.”
For two years, Azza worked in a number of jewelry workshops, while also working in the Agency, until she learned all the basic tenets of the craft. Azza described this period of her life, saying, “I was in a financial bind, and I had to support myself. Sometimes I had to make a choice between paying the bus fare or paying for my food. I had one and a half piaster, so I could either take the bus to Khan al-Khalili, or walk there and get to buy a fava sandwich with the money I have. I used to eat as I walked to Ramadan’s workshop. I had to make these choices because I wanted to buy the silver for the work. 10 grams of silver cost three piasters, and each gram cost three millimes.”
Azza began to sell her own designed jewelry in the stores owned by her friends, until she managed to get a small showroom in Boulaq, where she sold her designs every Tuesday. She also held an exhibition for the Jewry she created inspired by the Islamic windows, and sold all her products. Afterwards, she realized that she needed a more advanced training, and applied for a scholarship offered by the British Cultural Center, which allowed her to study for six months in a university in England.
Upon her return, Azza resumed her work at the same showroom in Boulaq, where she worked for 17 years, and held exhibitions to sell her products, until she founded her own factory in the 6th of October zone, and a headquarter in al-Mohandeseen. She started participating in international and global exhibitions, and became a referee in a number of international competitions for jewelry design. The Egyptian embassies in several countries around the world hosted Azza’s exhibitions.
Azza married an architect, and had her first daughter seven years later, then her second daughter. She got divorced after 16 years of marriage due to the differences in their character. She explained that the way her generation of women was raised did not allow for enough interaction between men and women for her to acquire the needed social experience for marriage and human relationships. Nonetheless, Azza never felt that being a woman was an obstacle in her professional career, and she did not find it difficult to be accepted as a boss by her male employees and assistants. Despite the hardships, Azza managed to strike a balance between caring for her two daughters, and fulfilling the work she was passionate about.
Azza spoke about the idea of having a career, saying, “all the women in my graduating class continued to work. All the sixties generation worked, as my friend always says. You know, Dr. Huda Zakariya once told me: ever since Abd al-Nasser had called on us, ever since we heard ‘oh the daughter of my homeland, our leader is calling on you to stand up and fight behind the men,’ we stood up and never sat down again. Indeed, we have not sat down again ever since, until this very moment. We all worked.”
Azza Fahmy cherished the field of jewelry design, and devoted her life to it. Describing her feelings towards her job, Azza said, “every day I go to work happy as if I am going to meet a loved one.” As for the way she saw herself, Azza stated, “in one phrase, a jewelry lover. In the past, I used to say I was a piece of jewelry. All my mind is on jewelry.”