What You Missed at the Vogue Business Global Summit: Middle East

Here’s a rundown of what you missed.

An Executive’s Guide to Innovation

To open the event, we cast our eyes to the future with Rosso, Marni CEO, Maison Margiela chair and board member of parent group, OTB, for an Executive’s Guide to Innovation. Rosso broke down his work on the Aura Blockchain Consortium, as well as the adoption of digital product passports (DPPs) across OTBs brand stable. While consumer desire for this kind of technology remains low, Rosso sees true value in DPPs to support and track secondhand luxury shopping, while helping brands understand how their products move after that initial purchase. “Technology is actually opening a big opportunity to have a dialog [with the customer] further down the line,” he said. “Unlike in previous generations, it feels today like we’re talking about a different consumer.”

OTB is in a stage of major transition across its brands, with debuts from Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela and Simone Belotti at Jil Sander, as well as the upcoming show of Meryll Rogge at Marni. Rosso underlined that fashion’s creative transition at large is in response to the challenging economic environment, and at OTB, he explained that outgoing creative directors John Galliano and Francesco Risso spent over a decade at Maison Margiela and Marni, respectively, as their contracts naturally came to an end. When it comes to Rogge, Rosso knew he wanted to hire a woman to helm Marni, because he feels women’s ready-to-wear is a major growth avenue for the brand — and a woman designer is well placed to develop that category. At group level, “there is much to do”, he shared, notably expansion in territories like the Middle East and LatAm, where OTB continues to open stores.

The Future of Appearance

For the second session of the day, we shifted gears to beauty, with a panel inspired by Vogue Business’s Future of Appearance series, published in April 2025. We brought together leading plastic surgeon and founder of the Aeon longevity clinic Dr. Jaffer Khan; wellness expert and Cosmic Doctor founder Dr. Lamees Hamdan; and longevity-focused dentist Dr. Mahsa Nejati, to unpack the innovations that are revolutionizing beauty and wellness. Each of the panelists underlined how wealthy consumers are shifting their spend to longevity and biohacking to reverse or slow aging. In response, surgeons, doctors and dentists are shifting focus to preventative wellness, whether that’s reducing inflammation, or improving skin quality to increase the efficiency of aesthetic treatments.

Dr. Khan’s Aeon, inside Atlantis the Royal, is a longevity-focused clinic that offers stem cell therapy, from blood-cleaning ozone therapy that removes metals and microplastics, to NAD+ IVs, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and infrared beds. It’s in response to scientific innovations. “At the human genome project in 2004, we decided the genome is the thing. Now, it’s the human exposome: the pollution around you, your sleep, your stress, your diet, what light sources you take in,” Dr. Khan said.