Sheytan unchained: how a dance with the devil set Mia Khalifa free

“It’s a little early in the morning, please excuse my pyjamas”, says Mia Khalifa, who is beaming in via video call from Miami. “It’s not even that early, it’s fucking 10 AM – I’m just really lazy today,” she adds. It may be the crack of dawn in Khalifa’s eyes, but she’s definitely not wanting for any energy. She’s here to talk about her new jewellery line, Sheytan, the first collection comprising slinky, gold body chains with logo name-plates that are made to be draped around hips, wrists, and ankles. They’re both subtle and suggestive – an ideal product for Khalifa’s first foray into retail.

On the call with Khalifa is Sara Burn, former Virgil Abloh collaborator, now-Sheytan business partner. After an initial encounter through mutual friends, Burn decided to take a meeting with Khalifa, but it was her daughters Ava and Cora that convinced her to take the job. “I came off the meeting like, ‘I've just met this woman, she's super interesting, but no idea who she is’”, recalls Burn with a laugh. It was only after testimonials from her daughters – both fans of Khalifa – that the designer and creative director decided to commit, a detail Khalifa is eternally grateful for. Thanks to teenage intervention Sheytan, a company where both women sit firmly at the head, was founded. “We're in a really, really enviable position of only having to answer to each other”, Khalifa says, adding that “we don't have a board of directors or a team of investors. Sara and I will sit down and say, ‘What do we feel? What do we think is right?’”

Despite Khalifa’s huge profile, Sheytan was born from a real-life passion, so when I suggest that this may be a ‘celebrity line’, there’s immediate pushback. “No one came to me like ‘do you want to put your name to this.’ I was like, I’m going to put my entire life savings into this, and it’s going to be really scary,”, she says, adding “this is not a celebrity line. This is a small business.” Khalifa makes true on the statement throughout our conversation. She speaks of the prominent part jewellery holds in Arab culture [“In the Middle East [good quality jewellery] was so much more common than in America”]; she recalls her earliest jewellery memory, when she was five-years-old at Catholic church [“I looked like a child bride, my hands covered in gold bracelets and gold necklaces.”] Elsewhere, she mentions Lorraine Schwartz and Tiffany-collaborator Elsa Peretti as inspirations, the latter having had no formal training. “I love that she also wasn't a jeweller,” Khalifa says, in comparison to herself, “she was just someone who wanted to create.”

There’s also another, slightly more existential reason for Khalifa starting her brand now. “I'm creeping up on thirty, slowly but surely, and I need to do something that’s fucking off the internet”, she says. Although the cult of Khalifa was most definitely born on the internet, this particular sentiment is less bites-the-hand-that-feeds-you, more self-preservation-through-creation. “To feel fulfilled, I need to build something tangible. I need to do something that doesn't just involve this” – she says, gesturing with her hands – “because I don't know when this will all go away”.

Though she doesn’t specify, “this” refers to the media hysteria surrounding her since she burst into our lives just shy of a decade ago. It’s a period where she built a huge platform [Khalifa currently has a combined 64 million TikTok and Instagram followers], but has also come with its fair share of detractors. Just last week, on the day Khalifa launched Sheytan, a user named MsPinkstarr posted four images from the line, alongside the caption “Mia Khalifa just dropped some bomb ass body jewellery from her brand Sheytan and I’m obsessed!!!” Despite the congratulatory tone of the original tweet, fallout soon followed. “Mia Khalifa owns a brand named Sheytan?????” asked one user, followed by a torrent of crying face emojis. “It’s called WHAT”, asked another, incredulously. “Y’all must not know what that means”.

“Religious extremists are going to be extremists, regardless. They were going to get mad at me showing too much skin anyway. It does not faze me whatsoever” – Mia Khalifa

“It's been really interesting to me to see the backlash for it,” says Khalifa. “Considering how often the word diablo is used in Spanish to convey the same cheeky-level tone that sheytan does.” Meaning devil or Satan in Arabic, when I ask Khalifa why she chose the name, she quickly responds “Why not?”, unable to disguise her annoyance at the line of inquiry. Once she continues, however, it's clear who that displeasure is directed at, and it’s not the person asking the question. “It's been really weird to see it claimed as an Islamic word, because it's an Arabic word – it's simply a word in Arabic,” she says plainly. But does she think any of the reactions are justified? “No. Absolutely not. I think it's grasping. It's looking to be overly sensitive. Religious extremists are going to be extremists, regardless. They were going to get mad at me showing too much skin anyway. It does not faze me whatsoever.”

We soon meander back to more positive things, and her inherent self-assuredness returns. Khalifa speaks with surprising knowledge on the industry she’s just entered, referring to optimum numbers of gold microns, debates on lab grown versus natural diamonds, her fondness for the work of Moritz Glik. Towards the end of our call, Khalifa mentions that an image by Fabien Montique was her “phone background for all of 2015, and I didn’t even know him”. Eight years later, that same photographer has lensed the images for her first campaign. “This is like the immigrant dream”, she says, excitement bursting from her voice. “I feel like I've finally accomplished something in my life. Instagram followers, TikTok followers – I couldn’t give two fucks about that. Doing this and having it out in the world… I'm good. I'm good.”

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