Dignity and reform, one thread at a time
“The business is not about Sarah Takesh becoming a famous fashion designer -- at all,” says Sarah Takesh, a fashion designer. She is rearranging clothes on a rack at Nyali, a light-filled showroom in the epicenter of Beverly Boulevard’s new shopping district. “In fact, that’s the kind of reluctant part of it. It’s much more about creating a situation for these people over there.”
“These people” are the craftswomen Takesh employs in Kabul to crochet, bead and embroider the pieces in her Tarsian & Blinkley line.
“The lady who made this has three kids, and a husband who disappeared five years ago,” says Takesh, spreading out a hand-loomed silk blouse in sea-foam green with a curlicue of aqua beadwork. “The theory is the Taliban took him, but no one really knows. She and the other wife -- because the guy had two wives -- live together in a rundown apartment that some Russians built 20 years ago, and they make their living doing stuff like this.”
While Takesh currently has enough work for about two-dozen women, her goal is to employ thousands. “Because I’ve just started marketing the stuff properly, I don’t have demand for hundreds and hundreds of pieces every week, so these women, I give them work when I’m in town, and then I take it away,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s a horrible, horrible thing. The goal is to give them security, and give it to them permanently.”
The quest to do well while doing good, to buy green, to think globally and act locally, has been gaining ground in the garment industry. Watchdog groups such as Behind the Label and the Clean Clothes Campaign are fighting the exploitation of garment workers worldwide, and young designers are joining the anti-sweatshop movement. Los Angeles’ American Apparel pays its local workforce of 1,300 an average of $10 an hour, and offers health insurance and access to massage therapists free of charge. Ethical Threads of London, according to its website, sources only from “marketplaces that meet international conventions on workers rights” for the shirts it supplies to rockers such as Billy Bragg.
While Takesh’s aims are similarly altruistic, their roots are reactionary. The 30-year-old designer, who wears a claret-colored blouse with a broad swath of embroidery across the breast and a necklace of wafer-thin gold coins she calls “Persian peasant jewelry,” is originally from Iran. With the onset of the revolution in 1979, her family fled, settling first in La Jolla and later in Marin County.
“My dad’s side of the family is classic dynastic nobility from the Ghajar, the former dynasty before Pavlavi,” says Takesh. “For Persians, they’re very WASPish and proper and don’t put obnoxious gilding in the house. The problem in that family is, it became all taste and no substance -- they didn’t have to work. This is why revolutions happen, because of people like this.”
Her mother’s family (who, Takesh says, “also have no work ethic”) is Kurdish. “Her father was a super-powerful khan, this massive landowner,” says Takesh. “My mother was the one who fed me all the stories of tribal life and made me think that Afghans were beautiful.”
She laughs. “These are all childhood issues that are patching together why I’m doing what I’m doing in my life.”
This patching has resulted in a line of ethereal yet earthbound pieces in silk and cotton, women’s tunics, trousers and skirts embellished with complex embroidery and beadwork. With the exception of several sequined halter tops, the clothes are modest -- knees are covered, nothing clings -- a style Takesh characterizes as “tomboyish
And yet, at least to a Western eye accustomed to newsprint photos of women in burkas, none of the styles say “Afghanistan.”
“Oh, this is totally a fairyland in my head, the whole thing, but this is where the Afghan women play the role,” says Takesh, holding up what looks like a little girl’s smock with gold stitching so precise it appears to be a gold chain. “Afghan ladies are so deft, they can take a rough gold thread that’s very difficult to work with, quadruple it, and then do it.”
Make-believe is evident as well on the company’s website, where “Tarsian” is Takesh’s doppelganger and “Blinkley” is “a lost English hero ... discovered by Tarsian in the Pamir mountains looking for his cufflinks.”
“I invented Blinkley’s character before I met [business partner] David Eliot,” says Takesh, “but Eliot turned out to be a walking, talking Blinkley.”
A faith in “the mystery of just talking to people, and things lead to things” has taken Takesh from Columbia University (where she studied architecture and ran with a crowd of rising art stars) to the New York garment industry to a stint in venture capitalism. “But I knew, even when I had blue hair sitting on the steps of Columbia’s law library, that I was going to end up in business school,” she says.
What sort of business she’d build began to take shape after two trips through Central Asia.
“Central Asia is exotic with a capital E, like nothing else,” says Takesh. “The people are kind of white, kind of Chinese, kind of Persian, kind of Indian. It’s the heart of an already very, very rich, crazy continent. You get this fabulous, difficult-to-decipher blend -- that was what was really inspiring....I turned to my friend and said, ‘Dude, I am going to do something here. This is what I’m going to do at business school.’ ”
In 2003, the year she graduated from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, her plan for Tarsian & Blinkley won the grand prize in the Global Social Venture Competition, sponsored by several business schools and Goldman Sachs and given to socially conscious business ventures. She combined the prize of $25,000 with savings and some investors’ money to open her Kabul workshop.
“The first time I went there was summer 2002 -- it was my summer internship for business school, and I met some of the women who work for me still,” she says. “The Taliban had just left, and really, the women were very stressed out, they were trauma victims basically. If they smiled they would cover their mouths in shame.”
Many of the women were returned refugees, and most girls of a certain age were illiterate because the Taliban had forbidden them to go to school. But they’d learned from their mothers the handwork Takesh pays them to do. Each tribe has a different specialty; one shirt might be worked on by as many as four different women, one to do the fine-gauge crocheting, another the beadwork, another the thread-counting kandahardouzi embroidery of Afghanistan, with its precise geometric floral motifs, which Takesh often puts on pants legs.
“But I don’t like them to do kandahardouzi too much, because it weakens their eyes,” she says.
Since Takesh opened her workshop, the women have “lightened up” to the point where they hang out and gossip -- and wonder at the ways of the West.
“Kabul is a big party town, and everybody’s got to have outfits to wear when they go out,” says Takesh. “These foreign girls, the expats, the U.N. crowd, will come by. So here’s this Danish girl running around the office in her bra, trying on this top.” She holds up a sheer mauve halter with a T-strap down the back. “The lady who made it is sitting on the floor, watching -- she doesn’t even know what this top is, [the women] don’t know what you would do with it....It’s slowly become this sort of cultural exchange, which softens everyone’s edges a little bit.”
As for the future of Tarsian & Blinkley, Takesh says she has to balance what the industry wants and what is good for her workers. “There’s all this pressure from the market to be super-hip,” she says, “but there’s no point in me making pieces that do not have handwork. They have to meet a double objective.”
They also need to be affordable if Takesh is to meet her goal of employing 1,000 people by year three of the business, 2,000 by year five. “If something’s $500, you’re never going to wear it,” says Takesh, mentioning that nothing in the line wholesales for more than $110. The line is already for sale (at retail prices) in stores in Brooklyn, Denver and San Francisco, and will be available in Los Angeles at Vionnet on Robertson Boulevard and Erica Tanov on West 3rd Street.
Packing up her samples, Takesh acknowledges that her dream might strike some as unrealistic, even dilettantish. “Everyone said, ‘What you’re doing is a quixotic delusion.’ And I am feeding my ego in some way....I am going to get so much satisfaction if I have this place for myself over there, where everything works, this beautiful factory of operation, and it’s done kind of old-style, with these mud structures with a central atrium space. I know where the kitchen’s going to be, where the embroidery is done, where the sequins get attached, where the hardware gets welded. And women come and go.”
