As director, Niv initiated a series of collaborations rare in the local landscape: a capsule collection built on the paintings of Gera Davidi for Comme Il Faut, and a Maya Negri production staged among the works of sculptor Avner Levinson. A portrait of a creative director who treats the fashion house as a cultural institution

The dialogue between fine art and fashion is one of the industry's oldest traditions: Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí, Yves Saint Laurent and Mondrian, Raf Simons and Sterling Ruby. In Israel, however, the distance between the gallery world and the shop floor has largely remained intact genuine collaborations between acclaimed artists and local fashion houses are still the exception.

Against this backdrop stands the work of Niv keren an alumnus of Raf Simons' studio in Antwerp, a Mifal HaPais Fashion Award laureate (2019) and a Vogue Italia Talents selection. At two different houses where he served as creative director, he initiated, curated and led collaborations with two of Israel's most respected working artists not as marketing gestures, but as substantive moves that redefined each house's language.



What is perhaps most revealing is that these collaborations did not remain internal creative exercises. They attracted sustained attention from both Israeli and international fashion publications, including Vogue Italia (Vogue Talents), Portfolio, Walla Fashion, Xnet, and Mako Fashion Forward, whose coverage repeatedly returned to Keren's ability to bridge contemporary art and fashion through a distinct visual language. That recurring editorial interest suggests that the projects resonated beyond the fashion houses themselves, contributing to Keren's growing recognition as one of the creative voices shaping contemporary Israeli fashion.

From Canvas to Cloth

The first initiative came during keren tenure as director of COMME IL FAUT, one of Israel's most established and culturally identified fashion houses. He approached the painter Gera Davidi a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between oil painting, embroidery and text, and whose work has drawn profiles in Haaretz and Portfolio with a twofold proposal: to paint new works that would serve as the basis for original prints, and, in parallel, to open his archive so that existing paintings could be selected and translated into textile. The result was a mini capsule collection built entirely around the paintings pieces in which the painting is not a decoration on the garment, but the reason for its existence.



Keren led the process end to end: selecting works from the archive, defining the brief for the new paintings, translating the canvases into prints across the house's silhouettes, and shaping the visual language of the campaign and launch. "What interested me was the moment a garment stops being a product and becomes a painterly surface — a woman wearing an artist's work, not a print 'inspired by' one," he says.

During Tel Aviv Fashion Week, the project extended beyond the rail. At keren's initiative, it became a small live installation: Davidi painted directly onto the walls of the brand's store while the capsule pieces were exhibited among the murals — turning the retail space, for a few days, into a working studio.

Maya Negri × Avner Levinson: A Dialogue in Tzafririm

The second collaboration was initiated during his tenure as creative director of the Tel Aviv fashion house Maya Negri this time with the sculptor Avner Levinson. Born in Jerusalem in 1981, Levinson spent nearly a decade living and working in New York, where he earned his MFA at the New York Studio School, and today divides his practice between Tel Aviv and New York, exhibiting in both. His work — in clay, papier-mâché, bronze and plaster — deals primarily with the human form and the fragile balance between the physical and the spiritual: figures that are less portraits than essences.

The production was shot at Levinson's open-air atelier in Moshav Tzafririm, in the Judean foothills a working space where his figures stand exposed to the landscape and the light. The location was not chosen as scenery. Keren set out to place the garments and the works in actual conversation: in the images, Levinson's figures and the model share a single frame, a single light and a single gravity the folds of the fabric answering the hand-marks in the clay, the collection's silhouettes responding to the posture of the sculptures.



The team, too, was assembled by keren with a curator's precision: photographer Asaf Einy, stylist Shay Lee Nissim; and international model Avital Langer, who made her runway debut as a Miu Miu exclusive in Paris, has since walked for Chanel and appeared in British Vogue, and whom Keren casts frequently. "I wanted the clothes to stand in front of a work of art and survive the encounter — to have enough quiet, and enough spine," he says. A Broader Mandate

The Levinson project was one expression of a wider role. During his time at Maya Negri, Keren led additional collaborations and creative initiatives with outside companies and brands, and was personally responsible for dressing the house's high-profile clients a mandate for which he was specifically brought in.

Creative Director as Curator

The two projects at two different houses, across two different mediums outline a consistent proposition: the creative director not merely as a designer of collections, but as a curator; someone who treats a fashion house as a cultural institution in conversation with the art of its time. It is an approach long associated with the great European houses, one that Keren absorbed at close range during his Antwerp time and that he has been among the first to apply systematically in the Israeli field. The premise running through all of it is simple, and quietly radical: that the most interesting place to stand is exactly where the painting ends and the garment begins.