Student Visit to Zarif Afghan Design

News

Skateistan
July 27th, 2011

Credit: Todd Huffman

By Shabana Saidali

The Tuesday older girls classes took a special fieldtrip to Zarif Afghan fashion studio in central Kabul a few weeks ago. Zarif Design is the label of Zolaykha Sherzad, and uses traditional Afghan fabrics in unique, modern designs that are influenced by both Eastern and contemporary Western fashion. This semester in class Skateistan students are discussing culture and all the different aspects within, such as music, customs, celebrations and, of course, clothing.

The class of 15 girls were all very excited about having the chance to visit the fashion studio of an internationally-renowned Afghan designer. Many of the girls have a huge interest in fashion so it was interesting for them to see firsthand that fashion design is a career possibility for Afghan women.
Some of the journalism students wrote something about the fieldtrip and took photos:

“Zolaykhaa is a designer and she designs Afghan clothes. The clothes they make are from Mazar-e-Sharif, like dresses, blouses, scarves, t-shirts, and they bring them to Kabul. She has 25 staff in her organization and sells the products in two places: one place is their office and the second is Ganjena. They have lots more foreign customers than Afghans.” - Muska Qasmi

“The Tuesday before Naw Roz we had a trip from Skateistan to Zarif design and that was a very nice place for showing off our Afghani dress. We previewed their clothes and it was a good experience. Also, we had some questions for their designers and workers. During our questions we discovered that Zarif design was the place where they adapted the Afghani dresses with different, modern designs, and they have customers from around the world.

One point that I wanted to question is why the clothes are so expensive when almost all the people of Afghanistan cannot afford them. The answer I got was that the clothes that they make have lots of investment, in each dress. For example the material they use for all of them is silk which they order from Mazar-e-Sharif. The buttons that they use are old (antiques). Their tailors are professionals so there are lots of ways that they change the clothes and improve them. And also I asked do they export their clothes to other countries. They said that no they don’t export them. I want to know if the reason is that if they export them they would need a bigger budget and that would make their prices go up, and so their customers would be limited.”

[Source: Skateistan]