There is a store in Alserkal Avenue that you cannot miss. Mustafa Al Hammad, the founder, will be the first to tell you: just look for the obnoxiously yellow one.

H5 Lab is a pop-up concept store built around archival Japanese fashion — Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garçons as its three pillars — but also a platform for regional designers, niche labels from around the world, and anything that carries a strong enough point of view.

The story behind it, though, starts much earlier: with a boy in Al Qatif inspired by the people around him — his mother, a deeply stylish woman, his older cousins and the way they wore their T-shirts, and the football players, noticing how certain ones carried the same kit just differently from everyone else on the pitch. Style was just always around him.

He spent hours on Tumblr, which is where Japanese fashion found him. Years later, after working his way from sales assistant to fashion buyer in Dubai, he found himself at a point where he wanted to open something of his own. Not necessarily a brand, but a space where people could learn and develop their interest in fashion. This is how H5 lab was born.

— Mustafa, you are from Saudi Arabia, but you spent much of your youth in Australia. How did that happen? How old were you when you moved?

— Yes, I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, in the Eastern Province, in a small town called Al Qatif. I lived there until I was about 14 years old. At that point, my family moved to Australia, where I ended up living for 10 years. And then, because of my dad’s work, we eventually moved to Dubai.

— So, you moved to a completely new environment when you were a teenager. Was it hard? Australia is so different from Saudi Arabia, both culturally and socially. What do you remember from that time?

— To begin with, I didn’t speak the language. The language barrier was the first challenge. When we arrived in Australia, my dad made a conscious decision to put all of us into a language school for a whole year. That slowed us down a little academically, but it was definitely for our own good in the long run.

Even then, language was tough. You spend a year in language school, graduate, and think, “Wow, I’ve mastered English.” Then you go to school with actual Australians and suddenly think, “What language are you guys speaking?”

After the language barrier came the culture shock of everything else. At the time, there wasn’t a large Arab community in the state of Australia where I lived, so that was something we were navigating as well. The school my brothers and I attended was almost entirely white. We were the only brown kids in the whole school, so that was another hurdle to get past.

— And did your interest in fashion develop in Australia, or was it already there before you moved?

— Growing up, I was always interested in how people dressed. I was surrounded by older relatives whom I admired, so I paid attention to what they wore and how they carried themselves. I was also into football from a young age and got excited when the new jerseys for the next season were released. I genuinely appreciated the style of it all.

— Was there any particular football team you loved?

— The one and only football team I have ever been able to love is Barcelona.

I’d notice things like how a particular player wore the uniform compared to everyone else. There are 22 players on the pitch wearing the same kit, but I’d still find myself drawn to the way certain players carried it. I wasn’t analysing it that deeply; I just thought, “This guy looks cool.”

When I moved to Australia as a teenager, I had a lot of time to acclimate to a new environment. Like many teenagers, I spent a lot of time online. One of the platforms that really resonated with me at the time was Tumblr. It was perfect for me: just endless streams of images.

After spending countless hours on the platform, I started coming across Japanese fashion campaigns. The imagery immediately caught my attention, but then I began noticing the silhouettes, the details, and the designers behind the work. I became curious. I’d ask myself, “Why don’t I see clothes like this around me? Where do people even find these pieces?”

I also think I was drawn to Japanese fashion because of certain parallels, however vague, between Japanese and Arab culture. There was something familiar there. Being away from my own culture, I was probably searching for points of connection, and perhaps that resonated with me on a subconscious level.

The challenge was that I lived in a small city. There were no retailers carrying these niche brands. So I couldn't really experience them firsthand.

That changed toward the end of my time in Australia, when I started discovering second-hand and archival fashion stores. That really opened my eyes. Around the same time, I was trying to make the most of every opportunity to travel through university. I went to China on an exchange program and later to Italy for a fashion marketing program.

At that point, I was simply curious. I wanted to learn more, see more, and absorb as much as I could.

— You mentioned that, growing up, you were fascinated by the way your older relatives dressed. Can you tell me more about that?

— When it comes to family, there are really two layers to it. The first, and most important, is my mother. There is no creative medium I can think of that my mom hasn’t explored. And the more we talk to her about her own childhood and upbringing, the more we realise she experimented with far more than we ever witnessed ourselves. She was a painter during her university years, for example. Whatever creative pursuit she picked up, she gave it her full attention.

Even now, she writes poetry, and she takes it very seriously. It is inspiring to watch someone so important in your life approach creative expression with that level of dedication.

There is also the way she dressed. She has always had great style. Even now, she is a very stylish woman with excellent taste.

The second layer is my extended family. Arab families are huge, and I grew up very close to my cousins. Most of them happened to be a little older than me, so I always had people to look up to. One cousin would wear his T-shirt a certain way, another would have a completely different style, and I paid attention to those details. I was surrounded by people who, in their own ways, were stylish, and I think that shaped me as well.

Then there was football, which was such a huge part of our lives. If you take Barcelona as an example, there were players like Ronaldinho or Edgar Davids — people who many would now consider style icons as much as sporting icons. At the time, they were simply the players we watched on TV every week or controlled in video games. They were just there, constantly present in our lives.

— And at what point did you start thinking about launching something of your own?

— One of the many things I did while I was in Australia was start my own clothing brand. When I moved to Dubai after graduating, my plan was to get a full-time job to fund the brand and keep building it on the side as a passion project.

I was quite serious about it. I had samples made and everything. In fact, I approached a store that would later become my employer, hoping they would stock my clothing line. Looking back now, getting rejected was probably a good thing.

I moved to Dubai during COVID, and after the lockdowns, I noticed that the same store was hiring sales assistants. I had worked retail before, I liked the store, and it carried a lot of my favourite brands. More importantly, I wanted to learn the industry from the inside out.

I was very transparent during the interview. I told them, “I’m here to learn.” I had built some local buzz around my brand in Australia, but I didn’t really understand the full journey of how a fashion brand operates. I wanted to know how brands produce, how they market themselves, how retailers work with brands, and how retailers market them. I wanted to understand the whole process.

I ended up getting the job and spent three years there. Eventually, I was managing the retail side of the business, directing marketing across multiple brands, and handling buying for the fashion store.

The interesting thing is that the more I learned, the more I began to question whether I actually wanted to run a clothing brand. There is still an itch there but once you really understand the realities of the industry, you start seeing other paths.

By my third year, a lot of people around me were encouraging me to start something of my own. The problem was that my idea of “my own thing” had always been a clothing brand, and by then, I wasn’t convinced that was the right move.

So I started asking myself what that could look like. People would suggest opening a store, which was never something I had imagined for myself. If I pictured a store, it was always because I was a designer, and it was a store for my own brand.

Thinking about it took me back to the last few years I spent in Australia and the archival and second-hand stores I discovered there. They had a huge impact on me. They made fashion more approachable for someone who was interested but didn’t necessarily have the funds to buy pieces directly from these iconic brands. They were also social spaces and educational spaces where people could learn, connect, and develop their curiosity about fashion.

When I looked around Dubai at the time, I felt that something similar was missing. I wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel — these kinds of concepts exist all over the world — but I wanted to create my own version of that experience, built around a personal curation of pieces and stories from the past.

— Before we move on with H5 lab, I want to go back for a second. I noticed an interesting detail in your journey: at one point, you worked as a delivery driver. How did that happen?

— That was actually my very first job! As soon as I started university, I didn’t want to depend too much on my parents for pocket money.

At the time, I had just started my clothing brand and was already making samples. I wanted some extra cash to keep funding it rather than relying on whatever allowance my parents gave me. So when I saw an opening at a new company called Deliveryboyz I thought, why not? I had a car, I could drive, and it seemed like a good way to make some money.

I met the owner, and he told me I could work whenever I liked, switching on and off whenever it suited me. So I jumped in.

It ended up being a really interesting experience. I learned a lot and had all sorts of encounters with people. I only did it for about three months, but it was definitely memorable.

— So now you are at a very different point in your life — you are a founder. I am curious about the name, actually: H5 Lab. Where does it come from?

— Honestly, it is not that deep. I had already come up with the concept and was spending the last few months of my previous job trying to figure out what to call it. As a fashion buyer, a big part of my day was opening my inbox and finding it full of presentations from brands that wanted to be stocked by the store.

At the time, there was a naming trend that seemed impossible to escape. Every second brand was called something “Studio” or something “Lab.” It is probably still happening now. I just found it funny.

Part of me wanted to poke a little fun at the industry. Since the concept itself was already highlighting some of the industry's flaws, it felt fitting for the name to do the same. I wanted something slightly cryptic, slightly silly.

The “H” and the “5” come from Arab internet culture. Growing up, when MSN Messenger and Facebook became popular, we used to write Arabic using English letters and numbers. In that language, “hhh” was how you expressed laughter in text, while “555” was more like a light chuckle — the equivalent of an “LOL.”

So I took the H from one and the 5 from the other, and combined it with “Lab.” In a way, it was a joke about everything around me being called a lab. H5 Lab just made me laugh, and that was enough.

— I am also curious about the design of the space itself. You are a fan of yellow, right?

— Yes! And again, it goes back to the same slightly silly logic and to my early teens, the MSN Messenger era, and later Facebook and Instagram. That period is important to me because it is also when I first picked up graphic design. It was really the beginning of my creative journey — the moment I started making things myself.

Because of MSN, I associate that time with the color yellow. The emojis were yellow, and for some reason, that connection stayed with me. So when it came time to build the visual identity of the store, yellow felt right. There wasn’t some deep conceptual reason behind it.

That said, it also works as a branding exercise. Yellow is loud. It grabs attention. When people ask for directions to the shop, I usually just tell them, “Look for the obnoxiously yellow store.”

— H5 lab isn't just about archival Japanese fashion; you also use it as a platform for local and regional talent. I recently saw your collaboration with a jewelry brand from Sharjah, for example. What kind of brands and designers can people discover through H5 lab? And have there been any particularly exciting finds that you have come across during your search?

— The clothes I curate revolve around three iconic Japanese designers: Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Those have always been the pillars of the selection. I came into this concept knowing that they would form its foundation, and most of my sourcing still centres around them.

At the same time, because of my own experience running a clothing brand, I know how difficult it can be to find a platform and an audience. From the beginning, I wanted this space to support talented designers from the region, whether they are based here or originally from here. Even at my very first pop-up, there was always one or two local brands included alongside the archival pieces.

That is something I have continued to do. Jewelry brand BARZAKH, for example, is based in Sharjah. I first came across their work a few years ago through Sole DXB. At the time, I didn’t even realise they were local, but I remember thinking their work was really strong. When the opportunity came to work together after opening the space, it felt like a natural fit.

Supporting regional talent is important to me, but so is maintaining a certain standard. It is not just about giving people visibility; it is also about highlighting work that pushes the community forward and encourages growth. I pay a lot of attention to that balance.

The other thing I have enjoyed is that sourcing constantly exposes me to brands, designers, and even cultures I wasn’t familiar with before. I have discovered some incredibly niche labels along the way. One example is a Hong Kong-based brand called Yat Pit, which I came across while sourcing for the very first launch.

That is often how it happens. You go down a rabbit hole online looking for pieces from designers you already know, then you stumble across something completely unfamiliar that stops you in your tracks. From there, you start researching the brand, the designer, and the context behind it.

So while I am trying to use this platform to educate and introduce people to different corners of fashion, I am also learning constantly myself. That is one of the most rewarding parts of the process.