There is no shortage of Indian fashion designers around the world but for Bangladesh and Bengali women especially, a fashion designer career is new. On the story, Suswana Chowdhury, reports on one Bengali-American woman who is trying to uplift the Bengali culture and heritage through her fashion label.
Mehjabeen Hassan, 24 years old, sits on her bed surrounded by yards of raw silk fabric in gold, blue, red, and white. Her room in Jamaica, Queens doubles as her design studio for her South Asian fashion label meant to represent the modern Indian-American woman. Born and raised in Bangladesh before emigrating to the U.S., Mehjabeen wants her clothes to reflect her dual identity both in style and creation.
“Whenever I ask anyone who can afford to get clothes from India and other places made for themselves for their wedding, not a single person shops in Dhaka for their wedding,” said Mehjabeen. “It’s only people who can’t afford to go to India for their wedding shopping that they would shop in Dhaka. And it’s mostly replicas and very cheaply made replicas of Indian designer clothing.”
Mehjabeen associates the lack of acceptance for fashion as a career in Bangladesh and thus a lack of options for why most people purchase clothes from India. For many Bengali women, being a fashion designer is not considered to be a viable option.
“You know India has really good design schools, we do too but that industry – fashion design, the career itself, it’s still very very new in Bangladesh,” she commented. “Even the ones that study outside, they come back to Dhaka and they open department stores. And they export clothing to other countries or they import clothing. And that’s the end of it, that’s the end of anyone who studies fashion design or anything related to that because it’s not a career. To anyone back home, it’s not a career. You must be willing to do something else besides that.”
Bangladesh does have a relatively conservative culture that also permeates into the homes of Bengali-American children in the U.S. Mehjabeen herself has faced a lot of prejudice and resistance from family and others in the community.
“I constantly get told that you have to have time for important things which are number one, marriage because your entire life has to revolve around that, a husband and a child,” she said. “If after that you have time, you can focus on your hobbies because to a lot of people this is a hobby.”
“But then it’s been what, it’s been almost two years that I’ve been doing this – people are seeing more and more of my work. And I see a lot of people coming to me and saying, ‘So where do you get your clothes sown and who does it for you?’ And then, you come to realize that they don’t know that I do these things by myself, that I’m actually involved in the hands-on process and actually making the clothes, making the patterns, and then to give to my seamstress to finish it off. Because to them that’s the norm.”
To try and renew the Bengali heritage in her fashion label, Mehjabeen creates designs with the natural fabrics found in the country as opposed to using synthetic materials.
“I try my best to get fabrics that were created in Dhaka and not in India, not just because it has anything to do with Bangladesh or Dhaka where you get the fabric from, just to be able to tell people that you can get your raw materials from Bangladesh and not India. You can get these fabrics made.”
“When I do my couture collection every single year, they are I have to say very small but I really really order them way ahead of time to make sure I get those fabrics that are truly Bengali in heritage and truly Bengali in their source, and not manufactured or weaved in India. But it’s really hard, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like all of the stuff that I have, the fabric and the materials, are from Bangladesh. Because it’s not, majority of it is not. And it’s sad, and hopefully when we expand and when we have the resource, I will have an office in Bangladesh and I want to be able to work with weavers who are local and create the fabrics that I want.”
To many people outside of the culture, there might not be an obvious difference between Indian and Bengali fashion. But there is a distinction. However, Mehjabeen commented, in the age of globalization a lot of people in the community are mixing up the two cultures making it seem as if everything is borrowed from India.
“Just like everything is global, everyone wants to be a global persona these days,” she said. “That’s all good and great as long as you don’t tell people that what you’re doing is actual Bangladeshi traditions because it’s not, you’re misleading people. I see a lot of friends who take people, their friends who are not South Asian to eat Bengali food and they’re calling Indian food Bangladeshi, and that’s all on us. This whole thing where we make it seem like Bangladesh has no real sense of fashion, food, culture, anything, we make it seem like that, it’s us.”
At the end of the day, Mehjabeen hesitates to call herself a fashion designer but hopes to one day expand the label into a recognized brand with a larger influence.
“I feel like when people say ‘oh you’re a fashion designer,’ I still feel really, for lack of a better phrase, I still feel really awkward that I haven’t reached at that level where I feel like a fashion designer needs to be in order to be called a fashion designer,” she said.
“I call it a label, not a brand yet as you can see. I have always called it a label and not a brand but someday when I reach that vision where I can custom make all the fabrics, I can create the pieces the way I want them to, that’s the day I’m going to call it a brand, that’s the day I’m going to call myself a true fashion designer. And that’s my end goal, that’s the goal of this label, to be recognized as a brand and not just another Instagram page that calls itself a label.”
Mehjabeen is planning a trip to Bangladesh in 2018 to start building a factory that will pay women fair wages and start to close the skills gap between men and women in the country. Reporting for Baruch College, I’m Suswana Chowdhury.