Our Story
Why we started Modest Ones
I reverted in 2022. I expected to feel peace, and I did everywhere except standing in front of my own mirror.
2022
Covering up shouldn't mean disappearing
Nobody warns you about that part. You're so sure of your choice, so happy in it and then some ordinary Tuesday morning you're standing in a pile of clothes that no longer belong to your life, and you cry, and then you feel guilty for crying over clothes.
But it was never about the clothes. I hadn't stopped loving colour. I hadn't stopped loving a beautiful fabric, a good sleeve, a dress that makes you stand a little taller. None of that left me when my faith arrived. It was all still there, with nowhere to go.
Getting dressed went from something I enjoyed to something I got through. And slowly, without ever deciding to, I started dressing to be unseen.
I wasn't looking for something to hide in. I was looking for something to feel like myself in.
The search
I looked everywhere, for months
Shapeless black, cut like a sack and sold as modest. Fabric so thin it lost its shape after two washes and never looked the same again. Or something genuinely beautiful, from a designer, at a price no ordinary woman is going to pay twice.
After a while you stop shopping and start settling. That was the part that hurt.
What we did about it
So I made the wardrobe I couldn't find
We started Modest Ones in 2023, from our home in Belgium, with almost nothing. I wasn't trying to build a fashion brand. I was trying to make one dress for one woman: the one standing in front of that mirror on a Tuesday morning, wondering where she'd gone.
One rule, from the first sample to every piece we release now , I have to want to wear it. Not tolerate it. Want it. That rule turned into a set of standards we don't move on, no matter what it costs us.
Fabric with weight
It hangs and moves the way it should, holds its colour, and still looks like itself after a season of real wear.
Floor-length, properly
Hems that reach the floor and stay there when you walk, sit and pray.
Sleeves with room
Long, wide bell sleeves that fall away from the arm. Nothing that clings at the elbow or grips the wrist.
Colour, deliberately
Butter yellow, sage, sky blue, warm neutrals. Modest doesn't have to mean black, and it never had to mean plain.
What happened next
30,000 women later
Then the messages started arriving. Women telling me they'd felt beautiful at a wedding. That something finally fit properly, for the first time. That they'd stopped dreading getting dressed in the morning.
I read them all. I still do and some of them I read twice, because I know exactly what sits underneath them. I know what it is to stand in front of a mirror and slowly stop recognising yourself. And I know what it is, one ordinary morning, to look up and find yourself there again.
That's the whole reason this exists. That moment.
Meryem
Co-founder, Modest Ones
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