FROM HERITAGE TO HIGH STYLE: URBANPAL’S PURPOSE-DRIVEN FASHION COLLECTIVE

By: Erica Commisso

Yara Alul left her high-powered job at Amazon Payment Services to follow her passion and to make a difference. With her sisters she started UrbanPal, an online fashion retailer and collective, to serve as her way of preserving Palestinian culture, promoting sustainability, and offering personalization in fashion. UrbanPal is short for Urban Palestine and an important part of its work is empowering refugee seamstresses by working with them to create customizable, high-quality pieces that celebrate Palestine’s art and heritage.

Of course, the current political climate has deeply affected Alul’s operations - and, at the same time, strengthened her desire to make a difference.

“Not only is the worst thing in Gaza the devastating death, destruction, and starvation, but there has also been an economic starvation. We find logistical challenges with finding children and compensating them for their artwork with reasonable fees, though this hasn’t stopped us from finding our small community and compensating them so far. It is also impossible to secure original artwork now even within Gaza, due to constant security concerns and restrictions,” she says. “For the time being, we focus on securing high quality images until we can receive the original pieces. We cannot work with seamstresses in Gaza at all either because embroidery organizations have shut down and people are simply focused on survival. Instead, we work with a community of Palestinian seamstresses in Jordan and in the West Bank while donating part of our proceeds to the Welfare Association, which is internationally audited and focused on supporting the community’s needs in Gaza. The uncertainty of life in Palestine today means it is very difficult to work with partners on guaranteed timelines and commitments.” 

Source: UrbanPal

Alul also says that UrbanPal is impacted by the fact that there seems to be a worldwide hesitance to work with Palestinians, and that the culture is often mislabeled, questioned, or antagonized. Representing the culture, she says, can be unpleasant and spark unwanted debate. Reclaiming the fashion and sharing it on a global scale is her way of taking that part of her culture back, of proving the vitality of supporting the communities. “There are serious attempts to claim our rich culture and to simply erase it. A critical part of our culture is Tatreez (embroidery), which is a craft that dates back thousands of years and is passed down from generation to generation and through community,” she says. “Tatreez ties us to our land, as embroiderers would stitch their surroundings, effectively documenting their lives and creating a historical repository of Palestinian motifs. It is critical to preserve Palestinian fashion today more than ever to maintain our link to the land that many have never seen but know so well because of such traditions.”

Tatreez is on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, and Alul notes the sense of community in the practice as well as the cultural history and artistic significance and brilliance. It serves as a testament to the embroiders’ lives, who tell their stories and stitch  their lives and their surroundings onto traditional dresses called thobes. “Because of this, Palestinian Tatreez is rich with thousands of motifs, telling the story of all the areas we come from,” she says. “You could tell everything about a woman from her thobe - when a women wore a black and blue thobe, she was known to be a widow. When she started to embroider onto it, she was getting ready to remarry. I met a woman who had inherited a thobe from her mother that looked ‘rather odd.’ After some investigation, she learned it was because each of the 7 refugee women who worked on it had embroidered her own area’s motifs onto the dress.”

Source: UrbanPal

To find the seamstresses for UrbanPal specifically, Alul uses an old-fashioned technique - word of mouth. Occasionally, UrbanPal also places requests for seamstresses on local groups. It is an open invite, and people can also nominate a seamstress via email, which broadens her reach in Palestinian communities that may not otherwise be able to reach her. 

Preserving Palestinian fashion, Alul says, is preserving a key cornerstone of the culture, as it goes so much farther than clothing. “Tatreez has always been a community activity, where women would come together to embroider together in a joint space,” she says. “Now more than ever such collectives are critical to preserving our heritage through education and craft.”