Reimagining Ethical Fashion

“Our lives are defined by the work we do. This is our life story, and we are the ones writing it.”

In the eastern region of Lebanon, lies a fertile valley that borders Syria: the Bekaa. Since the start of the Syrian war in 2011, nearly 500,000 Syrians have fled to this part of Lebanon in order to be close to their homeland. This is the largest number of refugees per capita globally. Being able to live in a similar climate, sharing language, culture, seasonal fruits, vegetables, and a mountain, offers comfort, and proximity nourishes the hope of one day returning. In December 2024, with the fall of the Assad Regime, this became possible. A weight, becoming almost too heavy to bear, had been lifted.

This weight I speak of is the burden of refugeehood. For the past 14 years Syrians in Lebanon have endured a pernicious, state manufactured, vulnerability. Maintaining legal status in Lebanon is an onerous and expensive bureaucratic process characterized by waiting and failure. Without paperwork, life becomes shaped by uncertainty and a litany of unknowns. In this liminal situation, mobility is prevented by a fear of arrest or deportation, work permits cannot be issued, children cannot enroll in school, healthcare cannot be accessed, apartment contracts remain unsigned, birth certificates difficult to obtain and bank accounts difficult to open.

In the summer of 2024, the Lebanese state conducted the most aggressive anti-Syrian campaign in its history. In the Beirut neighborhood where I live, leaflets on the streets read:

“To illegal Syrians…leave immediately, you have been warned. To Lebanese who are violating the law, it is forbidden to hire illegal Syrians and employ them in your shops and establishments. You are committing high treason. You have been warned.”

Denied the opportunity to re-root or re-ground, life in refuge is shaped by a distorted time-space. In this grueling headspace, there is a deep longing for a lost past life, dragging the mind and body into a cycle of inaction. Such inaction challenges future thinking and the building of community.

At Multi-Aid Programs (MAPs), a grassroots Syrian-led humanitarian organization in the Bekaa, a team of Syrians have been strategizing how to piece their fragmented community back together and maintain hope for a better future. I have spent the past six years working and collaborating with MAPs, designing projects that support the refugee community to preserve this hope. It is here that we developed LAMSA, a community-based fashion brand leveraging the power of craft to provide dignified employment and a space to develop new social bonds.

With crochet knowledge and skills already embedded in the community, passed down from generations of women, the development of LAMSA was an organic process. ‘Lamsa’ translates to mean touch: a physical touch, an emotional touch, a special touch. It is a call to rethink and reimagine forms of solidarity through craft. Amidst uncertainty and compounding crises, we experiment with color and pattern, nurturing beauty, joy and imagination through a caring design process that shares untold stories. Our work resists normative top-down models of humanitarian aid which entrap refugees in cycles of dependency and strips communities of their dignity. Instead, we work in an intimate way primarily in the home. By rejecting the power dynamics embedded in the humanitarian industrial complex, we arrive at an egalitarian space of co- creation where livelihoods are sustained through craft making, not through a food box.

In pushing the boundaries of normative models of aid delivery, we are carving out a new space at the intersection of grassroots community building and fashion. This goes beyond ‘ethical fashion’ - a term that addresses working rights, production line transparency and environmental sustainability, but fails to critically explore the dynamics at play between Global South- based artisans and Global North-based designers. Similar to humanitarianism, the fashion world is riddled with power imbalances. These create unethical and extractive tendencies that often appropriates Indigenous craft or limit artisans’ creative agency.

Working with intimacy and care in these interactions are crucial to the creation of all LAMSA pieces. Part of what makes our work a radical act of community building is that we center the lives and subjectivities of the artisans, leveraging the dignifying process of self-expression. These experiences are revealed in UNSPOKEN, an ongoing storytelling collection that reimagines what ethical fashion can be.

As our process evolves, we are strengthening a community that is committed to nurturing the seeds we planted. And while there is a powerful sense of renewed hope of a better future, uncertainty continues to linger. Returning home to Syria necessitates the rebuilding of basic governmental infrastructures, the security of finding work, and the money to rebuild destroyed homes. Our artisans are desperate to return, but it will take time. Until then, we will continue to create. And even in Syria, we will continue. With the weight of protracted refugeehood now lifted, maybe you will feel a difference in our crochet.