Two sisters left Afghanistan carrying the memory of a coat. In September they bring it back, onto a runway in Mayfair, during the busiest week London fashion keeps.
Aql&Nafs shows during London Fashion Week on 18 September at Dartmouth House, the Georgian mansion off Charles Street in the heart of Mayfair. The label was founded by Afghan twin sisters and built in London. Fashion Represents produces the evening, with a networking hour after the runway and press expected from Harper's Bazaar, ELLE and Grazia.
The name holds two words in tension. Aql is reason. Nafs is soul and appetite. The sisters place the label between them, and between the country they come from and the city they work in.
The coat
The Afghan coat sits at the center of the collection. It is a garment with a long cultural history, worn and copied far beyond the country that made it. Aql&Nafs takes it back and reworks it from the inside, from an Afghan point of view rather than a borrowed one.
That distinction runs through the work. The label is not lifting a motif and calling it inspiration. It is trying to reconnect Afghan design to its source, and to keep the people who carry that knowledge attached to what comes next.
The hands
The Heritage Collection is made in Afghanistan by women, by hand, with embroidery techniques passed down through generations. The work is home-based and paid. For the artisans it means income inside their own houses. For the craft it means the stitch survives another generation instead of vanishing with the last woman who knew it.
The founders describe skills at real risk of disappearing. Every commissioned piece keeps a technique in use, which is a slower and more durable form of preservation than a museum case. The story sits in the seam.
A coat can carry a country. This one is stitched by the women who still remember how.
The Splendid EditSlow
Aql&Nafs makes its contemporary pieces in small runs and to order. Less is cut, less is wasted, and nothing is produced on the gamble that it will sell. A share of proceeds goes back into longer-term work in Afghanistan, so the model funds the thing it draws from.
This is the harder path through luxury. It asks the buyer to wait, and it ties the price to origin and labour rather than volume. The clothes will still have to hold a room on their own. The idea behind them is already doing work.
Mayfair
Dartmouth House gives the show a setting with its own weight, panelled rooms and a grand stair a short walk from Berkeley Square. London Fashion Week has long made space for the newcomer and the outsider, and a small label with a clear story fits that history.
Courtesy of Fashion PR Firm
The founders are clear that this is not a look backward. They want Afghan craft on a runway because they want it in fashion's present, and in its future. On 18 September the coat gets its evening, and the women who embroidered it get a stage a long way from where they sat to sew.