I Went to Afghanistan to Teach Design—and Discovered Beauty Anew

Flying into Kabul is so beautiful. The city is surrounded by sharp, majestic mountains; mountains like I’d never seen before. It’s also a dusty or muddy city, depending on the season, but there is color—it’s a place historically famous for its roses and grape vines. (Kabul is where Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, had his famous garden, which was replanted and refurbished a few years ago.) It seems like an unlikely place for flowers and gardens to grow, the dirt being so hard-packed and the climate so harsh, but Afghans are excellent gardeners and take pride in the work, and color is everywhere.

I was 26 and living in Istanbul when I was hired by Zardozi, an Afghan nonprofit organization, to teach fashion design to Afghan women. Zardozi’s clients made small quantities of clothing and accessories—embroidered tunics, headscarves—for the local market. Between 2011 and 2015, my responsibilities evolved from providing open-source designs to creating a year-long curriculum for Zardozi’s staff in Mazar, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kabul—cities distinct in culture, style, even language.

The mission of the NGO I worked with was to identify and foster economic opportunities for Afghan women with families to support. Many of them hadn’t been formally educated, but had embroidery and basic sewing skills. Afghan embroidery is particular, and special; my favorite kind is counted-stitch embroidery, or tar shomar, in which tiny, neat stitches cover the entire face of the fabric in geometric motifs. It is so detailed and so tidy, one can hardly believe it’s done by hand. My other favorite is Kandahari embroidery. This is the type you see on men’s tunics; designs usually done tone-on-tone so that the texture of the embroidery almost shimmers. The women’s strength was their handiwork, and the course would challenge them to design tunics, headscarves, kurti and daman (skirt suits for the working women of Kabul), and sets for babies—pillows and blankets and crib covers.

I began by talking about color mixing as a way to choose color combinations: purple with red and blue, for example, or blue with green and a touch of yellow. I also spoke about warm and cool tones—cool plus cool, cool with warm—and the different effects that could create. I was met with blank stares. So, we focused on the basics with watercolor sets and color wheels: orange is red plus yellow; this blue next to this purple makes the purple look black. I remember one woman in particular—she was a natural designer with an instinctive understanding of tone and movement. Her work and her talent warranted much more than a lesson from me in the basement of the NGO’s building, sitting on thin cushions on a hard concrete floor covered with grey industrial carpet. If she had been born somewhere else, maybe she would have gone to art school or design school; would have been able to work, have a career. Instead, she and her mother lived with her uncle, dependent on him for everything, including whom she would marry and what her future would be.

I had students from Jalalabad, who wore traditional shalwar kameez, not jeans and tunics like the women from the big cities. Jalalabad is less affluent and more conservative; all the Jalalabadi women wore black abayas outside, two-piece cloaks that left only their eyes showing, and, like many Afghan women, they would not sit in the front seat of the car next to the male driver when we went out to buy fabric. But when they took their abayas off indoors, they had makeup on—strong red lipstick and lots of powder. And the patterns: One day, a student of mine pulled off her abaya to reveal an ensemble with a matching headscarf in not one, not two, but three different leopard prints. She had a fantasy that a man she knew who had made it to the States would send for her and they would marry.