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I've always wondered what made things cool. Why are some things cool while their counterparts decidedly not? Growing up in Cairo, home to the headquarters of the Arab League, in the early 2000s, the anti-Western sentiment (particularly the anti-American sentiment) was at a peak. Some of my earliest memories as a kid is waking up and making my way to the living room to find mom and dad watching the news. I remember it was always one of two things: either the civilian death toll in some country invaded by the United States or some angry mob of protestors burning the American flag. As a kid, I didn't know much about these situations but the American flag came to be associated with bad news, it had become a symbol of foreign intervention and imperialism.A few years pass, I'm at the mall, and I see a kid wearing a shirt with the stars and the stripes printed all over. It didn't seem like a big deal to anyone, especially the kid. He wasn't making a statement, he probably lacked the context and the association that I'd developed growing up, he just probably thought it looked cool. That got me thinking, what is it about some white and red stripes and a blue box with stars on it that is cool? It's not really that deep of a question, it's Rocky wrapped in the US flag after a knockout, or Tom Cruise in Top Gun with the flag behind him, or Captain America, or a Jasper Johns', or Lana Del Rey. It's a cultural export, not very different from fast-food chains, Levi's jeans, Hollywood blockbusters, and shopping malls. Ironically, while shopping malls seem to be dying in the US, they're still alive and well over here.It's fascinating how these cultural exports have been able to divorce themselves from the overarching political context to which they're tied, allowing them to be consumed by, and exist in regions that may be indifferent to their country of origin, to say the least. This is where you'll have crowds protesting American imperialism at the US Embassy, and ordering KFC when they get hungry. This American-style consumerism characterized by accessibility and convenience seemed harmless enough that people were able to let it through despite the ideological incompatibilities, leading to a global takeover.All of this taking place since the middle of the 20th century allowed these exports to be more ingrained in the importing cultures as time passed, changing what could be defined as Americanization to Universalization. Recalling back to when I was a kid, I remember begging my parents to go to McDonald's to get the Happy Meal, to me McDonald's burgers were as authentic to my culture as falafel. Compare that to my parents who've had the falafel first, then relatively recently, thanks to Infitah, were introduced to 'the burger'. However, to me, wearing blue jeans and a hoodie, getting into a drive-thru to get coffee, and ordering pizza when I get hungry isn't particularly American, it's always been there, and it's everywhere, it's universal.

I'm not lamenting the state of things, I don't think it's all bad. However, I think that this cultural globalization where everyone everywhere buys clothes from the same fast fashion brands, and food from the same fast-food chains, is condensing worldwide diversity into a uniform Westernized consumer culture. Where things that are cool and people want to associate with are those things that are presented through U.S.-produced entertainment media and sold by giant multinational corporations. Like the iconic Chinese takeout box, you know it: it's the white box with the red illustrations on the sides. You've seen it in a thousand crime movies where the detectives reach a dead end and need to pull an all-nighter to go through the files to crack the case. But you know what? I think that the koshari container is just as cool, it just hasn't been in a Hollywood blockbuster. The San Francisco cable cars are pretty iconic but so are Alexandria's trams. The same goes for New York's yellow cabs and Alexandria's black and yellow cabs. And to do away with counterparts, I think that microbuses (the de facto mode of transportation in Egypt) are pretty cool. I love those old tall buildings in Heliopolis that stand so close together that they form some sort of wall that sticks out against the relatively smaller buildings around, with what seems like a thousand balconies that should be laid out uniformly in a grid, and they are, yet the satellite dishes protruding from them, the outside AC units stacked over each other, and the fact that each of the balconies has been painted and maintained at different times, sometimes with different colors of paint, give these buildings an ununiform facade that a lot of people don't think too much of but I find very pleasant to observe.I think all these things are cool, but they're not appreciated enough cause they're in plain sight. We're kind of desensitized to them. What I set out to do when I started Mansour in 2018 was to try and recontextualize Egyptian motifs, put them in a different context, maybe, but not necessarily, in a context similar to where people see other stuff so that maybe they'll see that our stuff can be just as cool.

Omar Mansour
Founder and Creative Director