Fatma Al Mulla Designs a Tin for Garrett Popcorn Shops

From the Read. archive

One of the small stories the original Read. covered in its fashion pages: Emirati designer Fatma Al Mulla created a tin design for Garrett Popcorn Shops — a homegrown UAE design voice wrapped around one of America’s most recognizable food-gift brands.

The pairing made sense on both sides. Garrett Popcorn Shops is a Chicago institution — a family-run popcorn maker famous for the caramel-and-cheese “Garrett Mix” and for the collectible tins its popcorn ships in, which the brand has long treated as a canvas for artists and collaborators. As the brand expanded internationally, including into the Gulf, localized tin designs became part of how it introduced itself to new cities.

Fatma Al Mulla, meanwhile, was one of the young Emirati designers who defined Dubai’s independent fashion scene in the 2010s. Her label, FMM, became known for playful, pop-art-inflected prints that riffed on Khaleeji culture and everyday Gulf life — work that turned local in-jokes and iconography into something you could wear, and that traveled well beyond the UAE.

A popcorn tin is a modest object, but commissions like this one marked a real shift: international brands arriving in Dubai stopped treating the city as just a market and started hiring its designers. By the mid-2010s, Emirati creatives were being brought in to give global products a local accent — on tins, capsule collections, hotel interiors, and packaging — rather than the accent being shipped in from somewhere else.

The full text of the original Read. story has not survived in the web archives, so we’ve kept this page to what the piece reported in its headline and the wider context around it, rather than reconstruct details we can’t verify. If you have a copy of the original article — or one of the tins — we’d genuinely love to hear from you at info@readme.ae.