Sketching South Asia
Zara Sheikh
From the Notebook of a Local South Asian Clothing Designer
When she is not pursuing her Masters at Columbia’s School of Social Work, Zara Sheikh is a fashion designer who enjoys incorporating traditional modes into contemporary fashion. Born in Pakistan and raised in Brooklyn, Zara sketches, designs and sews pieces for South Asian women living abroad. Most of Zara’s work centers around rehashing the salwar kameez: the combination of dress and pants worn by women in South Asia. She places unexpected pieces of jewelry against solid, simple backgrounds. She also creates designs embellished with jewels, beads, sequins, laces, and hand-stitched embroidery using stones and thread. Her inspiration: eastern textiles, architecture, furniture, glamorous Bollywood films, international fashion runways, and her surroundings. In the end, her work becomes a mishmash
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of eastern and western design elements. Her passion began in high school, when she started sketching rough ideas on loose-leaf paper. Soon, she was sorting through her mother’s bag full of trims, laces, buttons, and fabric and dictating to her mother the garments she envisioned. She then took dressmaking classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology and drafting classes locally, and mustered up enough courage to sew her own creations as an undergrad. She avoids assembly-line looks and believes a woman deserves custom designs flattering to her figure. The traditional styles are replicated over and over in local ethnic markets and overseas, but Zara’s pieces are different: they give life to what lies between east and west, to what South Asian women want to wear.