Bella Hadid, Dubai Hills and a Major New Flagship: ALO Is on a Roll

It feels like everywhere we look lately, someone is wearing ALO. On the way to Pilates, grabbing coffee, travelling, and increasingly, nowhere near a workout at all.

The Los Angeles-born brand has managed to turn activewear into something closer to a lifestyle uniform, building its world around that now-familiar studio-to-street idea. And if its latest moves are anything to go by, that world is only getting bigger in the UAE.

ALO has just expanded its Dubai presence with a new store at Dubai Hills Mall, which opened on August 28, with another, much bigger opening already around the corner. On September 18, the brand will open its largest UAE flagship at Mall of the Emirates, joining its existing locations at Dubai Mall and The Galleria Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi. The expansion comes through ALO's partnership with Alshaya Group.

A New 950-Square-Metre Home

The Mall of the Emirates flagship is the one we're particularly curious to see.

Spanning 950 square metres, the store is designed to bring more of ALO's wellness universe into the retail experience. Alongside its fashion and performance collections, the space will feature luxurious fitting rooms, a dedicated VIP seating area and, perhaps most unexpectedly, an olive tree built directly into the store, a nod to the brand's focus on nature and mindful living.

It makes sense for a brand that has long moved beyond leggings. Founded in Los Angeles in 2007 with yoga and mindfulness at its core, ALO now stretches across performance wear, everyday fashion, wellness products, community experiences and digital fitness.

And Dubai, where a Pilates class can quite easily be followed by lunch, shopping and dinner without anyone ever changing out of their activewear, feels like particularly fertile ground.

The expansion also comes at an interesting moment for ALO globally, as Bella Hadid recently became the new face of the brand's Pre-Fall 2026 campaign.

Photographed around Los Angeles by Mert & Marcus and styled by Mimi Cuttrell, the campaign places Hadid in the kind of performance pieces that have become synonymous with the ALO uniform, but the partnership goes beyond the usual celebrity-in-leggings formula.

Hadid has spoken about how her relationship with wellness has evolved as she has grown older, with slowing down, movement and creating space for herself becoming increasingly important parts of her everyday routine. That makes the partnership feel fairly natural for a brand that has built much of its identity around wellness as a lifestyle rather than simply working out.

It also doesn't hurt that Bella has spent years helping define the very model-off-duty aesthetic that turned leggings, tiny sports bras, oversized jackets and sneakers into legitimate fashion territory.

Perhaps that's the most interesting part of ALO's continued expansion. What began with yoga has become an entire visual language around how wellness looks today.

The gym and the wardrobe have become increasingly difficult to separate, while Pilates, recovery, matcha, supplements and activewear have somehow found themselves living within the same lifestyle universe. ALO has been particularly good at positioning itself right in the middle of it.

With Dubai Hills now open, its biggest UAE flagship arriving at Mall of the Emirates in September and one of fashion's most recognisable faces fronting its latest campaign, ALO clearly sees plenty more room to grow here.

Judging by the number of ALO sets already walking around Dubai, we'd say the feeling is mutual.

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