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Afghanistan : First national fashion clothing brand gets popular |
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2004-8-9
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Beads glitter on the neck of a polish silk blouse. Petals and geometrical patterns stud the hem of a pair of trousers.
Traditional Afghan embroidery on refined modern clothing creates a mysterious beauty.
Afghanistan''s first fashion brand -- ''Tarsian & Blinkley'' -- is selling fast in New York and various other cities around the world. It is a product of a company a 30-year-old female fashion designer has created with the local non-governmental organization ''Morning Star.''
Morning Star''s office in the Taimai residential area in the heart of Kabul is always crowded with Afghan women, mostly those who lost their husbands to war, trying to meet the designer, Sarah Takesh, to sell their embroidered products.
Sarah was raised in Iran until the age of 5. Her father is related by blood to a noble family of the Qajar dynasty in the late 18th century, and her mother is a daughter of a powerful feudal lord in Kermanshah in western Iran.
The family lived comfortably in Iran until 1978, when increasingly violent protests against the Shah, the country''s ruler at the time, took place, forcing them to flee. They resettled in California.
Sarah studied architecture at Colombia University in New York, acquired a U.S. passport and then travelled to India and Pakistan.
In the summer of 2001, she first visited Peshawar, Pakistan, where many Afghan refugees live in a dangerous environment.
"This is the world I have long sought," she said then, shivering with intuition. She remembered her mother saying, "Afghan people are beautiful and interesting. They are real Persians," and decided to do business with them.
Sarah returned to the United States and entered business school. Soon after that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, hit New York and Washington, and Afghanistan became a focus of global attention.
After the collapse of the Taliban regime, Sarah read a newspaper article saying the United States had asked an Afghan NGO to manufacture uniforms for the new Afghan military.
She came up with the idea to ask the NGO to produce clothing and got in touch with Morning Star.
Several months later, with cloth bought in India, she visited Peshawar to meet Morning Star executive Nasrullah, 45, a dressmaking teacher to more than 1,000 women.
The two soon found they were kindred spirits, as Sarah spoke fluent Farsi, the most widely spoken Persian language, and the teacher spoke Dali, a kind of Persian.
Sara then went to Kabul and had a needle worker introduced to her by Nasrullah, embroider the Kandahar area''s traditional ''Kandahari Dozi'' on three blouses.
The products were excellent, and she decided to produce Afghanistan''s first fashion brand.
She brought 60 items of embroidered clothing to the United States, and people were astonished by the creations. The fact that they were products from impoverished, war-torn Afghanistan generated further surprise.
Sarah''s first collection was a great success.
"Traditional Afghan embroidery is not as strong as India''s or Iran''s, but is quite elegant," she said.
Sarah checks every product herself. "Unless I check each product with my own eyes, the quality will be lower."
At present, about 500 items of clothing are produced each month, and Sarah is seeking to enter the Japanese market.
She has travelled extensively through Iran, the United States and Asia in search of a place to settle, but has come to no conclusion.
"I am neither an Iranian nor an American," she said. "I am Persian." |
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