Fashion
Clothing with a Conscience
Designer’s line for young Muslims takes off
kvb208@nyu.eduThe walls of Sarah Musa’s cramped, two-bedroom Bleecker Street apartment are covered in clothing sketches and fabric samples, but her roommate doesn’t mind. She’s a fan of Musa’s three-year-old clothing business, Haya, Arabic for modesty, which is headquartered here. Haya is a line of conservative-yet-fun clothing Musa designed with young Muslim women like her roommate in mind.
“People think that if you cover your head, it is hard to be fashionable, which is something I am trying to change,” Musa says.
In two years, she’s done just that. Last year, Haya averaged 70 Web-based sales a month, domestically and from other countries, including in Australia and South Africa.
Musa recently showed a visitor a surprisingly daring set of Geisha-inspired swimsuit sketches, one featuring a rich, sand-colored triangular top in a fan shape.
“I sketch everything I think of,” she says, not necessarily to make things, but to capture her imagination. “When I wake up, I sketch like crazy,” she says, “trying to draw everything that I dreamed about.”
Musa says she’s been a fashion enthusiast since her parents, who owned a variety of shops and restaurants in Ohio, let her choose her clothing. In middle school, she began rummaging through thrift stores and her parents’ closet, and learning to sew some of her own clothing from scratch by simply measuring herself and drawing patterns directly onto fabric (“Which is totally not the right way!” she says). She hadn’t yet begun observing Islam’s conservative dress traditions. “I would wear things like my dad’s pants from the 60’s!”
At 16, Musa embraced her father’s religion. Wearing the hijab, or headscarf, became important to her spiritually, and her interest in the scarf and her longer skirts as spiritual symbols seemed at first to clash with her passion for fashion.
“Becoming religious was like an identity crisis for me,” Musa said. “I had these two loves, religion and fashion, and I didn’t really know how I could make the two of them work together.”
There wasn’t much fun, conservative clothing around, so Musa had to sew her own. At first her pieces were simple and poorly made. But she soon began to expand, making her own patterns and designs.
Slowly, she realized Islamic fashion could become more than just a hobby.
She wasn’t sure it was a viable career, though. So at Ohio State University, she studied Human Development and Family Sciences, thinking she’d be a teacher. Musa started Haya her senior year, and momentum built quickly. With funding help from her father, she hired a full-time staff, with some serious business plans in mind. She rented a space, and started a website. Within months, Haya was thriving.
Now 23, Musa, who is fair-skinned, half-Palestinian and half-Korean, with piercing brown eyes, is studying pattern making at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology, and interning at the fashion houses of Carolina Hererra and Anna Sui. She continues to running Haya in her spare time, selling her inventory of 14 or 15 styles.
She was surprised to discover that the fashion world seemed to accept her.
“I had never had a Muslim intern,” explained the head patternmaker at Anna Sui, “but she is so unique! Several times she has come in and we have loved what she’s had on. She has a really great eye for putting things together.”
“The more I learn about the process of designing, making and marketing clothing, the more difficult this whole process of owning a business and being a fashion designer seems!” Musa said. “But I didn’t have the sense that starting my own company was impossible because my parents are both small-business owners.”
Next up for Musa is a new clothing line, Inaya, “to care” in Arabic, that she expects to launch when she graduates next year. While Haya offers traditional Arab dresses or skirt-and-dress sets, Inaya will be younger, hipper and more urban, with brighter colors and more complex designs and fabrics.
“What I envision for Inaya is much more Urban Outfitters, designed for girls like me who would like to shop there but have trouble finding anything they can wear comfortably,” she said. She’s also planning maternity wear and children’s clothing.
And she wants people to know her clothing isn’t only for Muslims.
“My clothing is for everyone: Christian, Jews, atheists, it doesn’t matter what you are,” she said. “I just want to create clothing that has a little more of a conscience.”