Afghan refugee Sarwat Najib rebuilds her fashion brand in Wisconsin
STEVENS POINT − In 2019, Sarwat Najib bucked the odds and opened a fashion design firm in Kabul, Afghanistan.
By 2020, the business, called Shamla Atelier, was thriving. Najib, 42, was running a clothing production facility and cultivating an international clientele by producing high-fashion dresses that mixed Western chic with traditional Afghan stitching and embroidery. She had hired dozens of women and offered women free sewing lessons so they could start their own businesses from their homes.
In August 2021, it all crumbled apart in a matter of hours. The United States had reached an agreement to end its 20-year war with the Taliban, and the sitting president of the Afghan republic, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. His government disintegrated. The Taliban, already in power in the northern areas of the country, began to take control as Kabul fell into panic and chaos. When Najib left her factory and workers that day, she never saw them again.
Now three years later and resettled in Stevens Point, Najib hopes that she might be able to replicate the success that Shamla Atalier once had in Kabul in another unlikely place, central Wisconsin.
The major hurdle she faces now is the lack of startup money. She’s applied unsuccessfully for grants, she said, and she’ll keep on trying.
Shamla Atelier was about more than earning money.
“I just wanted to support Afghan women,” Najib said. “It was community empowerment. It was women empowerment.”
A desperate run from Taliban, to a new life in America
Najib and her husband, Najib Azad, a press secretary for Ghani, and their four children had to get out, and fast. They were lucky to be able to get to the airport, and were part of a mass exodus of refugees who fled for their lives as the Taliban took power and began clamping down on the rights of girls and women.
Najib and her family eventually were placed in Stevens Point by a refugee resettlement agency. They found themselves starting over from nothing, and that includes Shamla Atalier. Essentially the brand has only an online presence, Najib said, and a small number of dresses that her brother-in-law shipped to her after she and the rest of her family settled in Wisconsin.
Though she hasn’t been successful in getting the capital to open a manufacturing shop like she had Kabul, she has pivoted to keep Shamla Atelier alive.
She uses the brand’s social media presence to educate people about how Kabul once was a city with progressive fashion. It’s hard for outsiders to believe, she said, because for decades the news and photos coming out of the country has been about war, strife and bloodshed.
She wants people to know the other side of the country and its people. She wants people to see that Afghanistan also has its colorful side, its skilled tailors, and beautiful embroidery.
When Najib went to college in Pakistan, she first studied graphic design. But she changed that to fashion design because she believed that communicating through her clothing was a way to show another side of the country she was born in.
“In the 1960s and ’70s, Kabul was a hub of fashion,” Najib said. “Afghan women were very fashionable. … Afghan women were more modern than even the European women. Afghan women wore miniskirts at that time. In Asia. In Central Asia. Imagine that.”
Sharing the story about Afghan culture and fashion
Najib has had success in sharing her vision and her story since moving to Stevens Point.
Najib recently was featured on Wisconsin Public Television’s “Wisconsin Life”, on which she explained how she once again hopes to use fashion as a vehicle to build a business and community that can support women, especially refugee women.
“My business slogan was that I’m not running a brand, I’m running families,” Najib told program producer Ali Khan.
In 2023, Najib partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s College of Fine Arts and Communication to present a three-session residency, in which she taught seminars on Afghan dance, fashion and the “Golden Age of Afghanistan,” and presented a fashion show featuring the designs that were saved after Kabul fell to the Taliban.
She also spoke in October 2024 at The Highground Veterans Memorial Park near Neillsville.
Meanwhile, she made some practical inroads toward building Shamla Atelier in central Wisconsin. A year ago, Najib partnered with CREATE Portage County, an organization devoted to building community and entrepreneurship through the arts, to offer a series of free sewing and embroidery classes.
The aim matched the goals she set in Kabul, to help women develop personal growth, financial stability an overall well-being.
Keith Uhlig has been writing about Wisconsin, its people and all it has to offer since 2000. Raised in Colby, he loves wandering around the state. He can be reached at [email protected], and is on Facebook, X and Threads.
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