Sarah Ansari believes beauty can do what politics has not. A mother of four, she founded the clothing company Artizara in the hard years for Muslims after 9/11. She has kept it going for more than a decade, even as negative attitudes toward Islam and Muslims kept getting worse.
In her view, beauty does not belong to any one religion. Islamic art and its heritage, she says, can connect people even when they share no language.
Fourteen centuries of design
Islamic art goes back more than 1,400 years, and every major museum in the world holds a collection of it. Certain motifs are easy to spot wherever you travel in the Muslim world. Geometric patterns, flowing florals, detailed miniatures and fluid calligraphy all carry beauty and deeper meaning. As a result, they speak to people of every background, not only to Muslims.
That tradition carries over into Islamic clothing. Clothes do more than keep us warm and dry, after all. They signal personality, mood, values and faith.
Muslim dress, and especially what Muslim women wear, has drawn debate and even hate in recent years. That is because clothing carries social history. A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Items: Is Fashion Modern?, makes the same case by looking at garments that changed the world. Ironically, it shows both a burkini and a bikini.
While most of the attention on Islam is negative, the small team at Artizara has been quietly working on a different story. Ansari describes it as an uplifting one. She points to the beauty in the shared artistic past of the Islamic world and in its lively cultures today. That story has a ready audience, she says, and its time has come.
A young market that wants its own story
The numbers back her up. According to the Pew Research Center, about 1.8 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world, are Muslim. The group is growing faster than any other faith and is expected to pass 2.4 billion by 2030. Since it is mostly young, it pushes back on the way mainstream media portrays it, and big business has noticed.
Modest and Muslim clothing brands have multiplied recently. Mainstream designers have long borrowed Islamic motifs, and now models in hijabs have walked at New York Fashion Week. They have also appeared on the cover of Vogue and even in Playboy.
Still, most of what appears on runways and in the new modest fashion lines is Western clothing made more covered. It rarely draws on Islamic artistic heritage or cultural roots.
Ansari thinks the moment is right for a global clothing and lifestyle brand built around art, and Artizara is making that bet. The idea is to turn the richness of Islamic art into modern fashion and lifestyle products. The brand also wants to attract young Muslims of every kind and help them tell a story grounded in shared history, heritage, experience and hope.
