Amina Muaddi

Amina Muaddi

Amina Muaddi was born in Romania in 1986 to a Jordanian father and a Romanian mother, studied fashion communication at IED in Milan, and worked as an assistant stylist at L'Uomo Vogue, Vogue Italia and American GQ. She then spent a year learning shoemaking from artisans in Riviera del Brenta, co-founded Oscar Tiye, left it, and launched her own label in August 2018.

Shoes

The flared heel is the whole business. Muaddi developed the wide kick-flare shape because she decided her own early designs were not interesting enough, and it became one of the most copied silhouettes of the last decade. Each shoe reportedly comes together from forty to fifty separate components.

More Shoes

She learned the craft the long way, spending a year with suppliers and artisans in Riviera del Brenta, Italy's historic footwear district, before co-founding Oscar Tiye in Milan. She exited that brand in 2017 and launched her own the following August. Along the way she designed runway footwear for the couturier Alexandre Vauthier in Paris.

Still more Shoes

Rihanna's stylist Jahleel Weaver made the introduction, Rihanna became a regular, and at the end of 2019 she commissioned Muaddi to design footwear for Fenty. The first drop landed in July 2020 and a second followed that December. It won them Collaborator of the Year at the Footwear News Achievement Awards.

Our honest take

Muaddi won Entrepreneur of the Year at the Fashion Trust Arabia Prize in 2021, took the Neiman Marcus innovation award in 2023, opened her first flagship on Avenue Montaigne in July 2025, and has kept the business self-funded throughout. Buy the heel shape rather than the crystal bow, which is the part everyone else has already copied. The construction is the reason these outlast their trend cycle.