A Party After Hours at Cairo’s Oldest Museum

Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music.

Nut (pronounced “newt”), the ancient Egyptian goddess of the sky, was often depicted as a slender naked woman covered with stars and arched over the earth in a protective downward dog-like stance. She appears in a similar form on the label of the new Cairo-based brand Anut, which offers home goods — such as palm tree-embroidered linen tablecloths, wicker place mats and animal-shaped ceramic candle holders — inspired by traditional Egyptian crafts and produced by local artisans.

The line’s founder, Goya Gallagher, 54, and creative director, Cruz Maria Wyndham, 40, were drawn to the goddess in part because of their commitment to hiring and training women. “We want to help our artisans go to the next level if that’s what they want,” said the brand’s managing director, Nevine Ramzy, 35, adding that the team will even help negotiate micro loans for their employees so that they can build their own businesses. The company is intent, too, on providing a platform for rising Egyptian creative talents. “We’re collaborating with the poet and photographer Mahmoud Khattab on a project in the Fayoum Oasis with some of the ceramists we work with,” said Gallagher, and partnering with the designer Omar Chakil on a series of vessels carved from Egyptian alabaster.

In November, the brand opened a boutique in Cairo’s leafy Zamalek neighborhood, but it officially launched this month. To celebrate, Gallagher, who splits her time between Cairo and London, invited friends and collaborators to a decadent costume party at the Egyptian Museum, built at the turn of the 20th century in downtown Cairo. She chose the idea of “offerings” for the gathering’s theme, a reference to ancient Egyptian rituals and also an acknowledgment of her gratitude to the country. Born in Ecuador, Gallagher first came to Cairo on vacation in 1992; “I decided Egypt was my destiny,” she said, “and never left.”

She asked the Egyptian-born, New York-based artist and designer Laila Gohar, 36, to oversee the food for the event and to make a series of tableaus around the museum. “It was the greatest honor of my career to be allowed to create an installation in this iconic monument filled with Egyptian history,” said Gohar. The theme inspired her to research the history of the country’s bread, which in Pharaonic times was often used in rituals. On the museum’s second floor, she installed a five-foot-high totem of green glass bubbles to represent the centuries-old art of fermentation, and an equally tall tower of woven grasses that referred to emmer wheat, the grain that ancient Egyptians used to make bread. Another part of her intervention was a simple wooden stand from which she and her team hung hundreds of small, cookie-like flatbreads. “They’re offerings for the guests to take with them,” she explained as her 1-year-old son,Paz, attempted to take a bite of one.