Culture
Zohran Mamdani’s Wife, Rama Duwaji, Has Everyone Talking
During Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech, after he was declared New York City’s first Muslim and youngest mayor, Rama Duwaji stood beside him in a laser-cut denim top by Palestinian-Jordanian designer Zeid Hijazi, paired with a skirt by Ulla Johnson. Every detail felt intentional. Hijazi’s pieces often reinterpret traditional Palestinian embroidery through contemporary silhouettes, and on Duwaji, the look felt deliberate, an expression of identity as much as style.
Born to Syrian parents and raised between Dallas and Dubai, Duwaji is a visual artist who works primarily in illustration and animation. Her work explores memory, heritage, and belonging through form and texture. On Instagram, she shares glimpses of her process: a hand-built vessel, an unfinished drawing, a quiet studio moment. It is not curated for effect, it is documented for continuity.
Her approach to fashion feels the same, grounded, tactile, and precise. She favours structure over spectacle, ease over excess. The result is a kind of visual consistency, her work, her clothes, her presence, all speaking the same language.
Together, she and Mamdani feel like a reset. Where political couples have often been defined by image and distance, they project something else entirely: warmth, collaboration, and an ease that feels real. They met on Hinge, a detail that fits the kind of grounded normalcy they bring to public life.
We recently looked at how Mamdani is reshaping what political influence looks like, a leader who moves with intention rather than spectacle. Together, the two seem to be redefining what modern power can look like.
Gen Z audiences, fluent in irony and authenticity alike, see in her the kind of ease they have been craving, influence without performance.
Duwaji is not trying to represent anything larger than herself, but she inevitably does, part of a wider cultural moment where art, politics, and identity overlap, where expression and intention share the same frame.
What her next chapter looks like, in style, art, or influence, remains to be seen. But if this moment is any indication, it will be worth watching.
