Every morning, we wake up to NPR. Usually, since we've been up most of the night working, it takes an hour or more to climb out of sleep and out of bed. The news stories enter our consciousness first as fragments of our dreams.
Recently I dreamed I and our President were in a rather Victorian parlor face to face with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; I was trying to coax Bush to answer the letter Ahmadinejad had written; Bush was dressed in a blue jumpsuit with a long-billed red cap. Needless to say, it was difficult to get him to concentrate.
So, when Toni had finished a group of concept sketches for a group of beautiful travel bags with cargo pockets and said "Let's call this the Gaza collection," I was not surprised. But I thought because of the news she might have gotten confused. "Don't you mean Giza?" I asked. "Like the pyramids?" No, she meant Gaza: "like the Gaza Strip." I worried for a while, wondering what the fashion community would make of something like this; would anybody be upset? It seemed needlessly controversial. Toni insisted. She said she had been thinking a lot about what we'd been hearing on the news, and about the region as she designed the bags. She reminded me why we started the company - in part because we wanted the freedom to do what we thought was best. I capitulated, and the collection is called Gaza.
Then I waited. Waited for somebody to comment; or even notice. One way or the other. Days passed by; the bags were on the linesheets; weeks passed by. Then months. The bags arrived. People bought them. Nobody seemed to notice. Before, I had been worried somebody would notice - now I was a little irritated nobody had. But finally, someone did notice, and asked us about it. Her response was worth it. Read Hala's blog post about it
here. Thanks Hala for being curious and daring to ask!
Labels: fashion, handbags, politics