(This article was a winning entry in the Cathay Pacific Connecting the World 2011 competition)
Dialog Worldbutik is an international design studio, founded by two cross cultural Central St Martin’s graduates. Their focus is on working with art therapy, women empowerment projects and the work of people with disabilities, and turning that into vibrant fashion products. It involves the journey of left over pieces of cloth that become part of a beautiful handbag via a traditional South East Asian household recycling technique. It is the journey of neglected women across Asia who find dignity in partnering their micro business with the company.
A journey such as Aminta’s. Grateful for the financial independence she has gained, she collects left over cloth from local tailors, folds each scrap four times as instructed by the girls at Dialog Worldbutik, and sews them together. The cash she receives from her work has helped her to fund a new birth certificate for her daughter, enabling her to go to school. Aminta’s story is echoed by the other single mothers in her urban Jakarta community, and also by HIV sufferers in a rural Malaysia care centre, tsunami survivors in a cooperative in coastal Thailand, and impoverished farm girls in a sewing school in rural Vietnam.
All the lengths of trimming travel to Dialog Worldbutik HQ in Hong Kong, where they are lovingly incorporated into vibrant handbag designs of all shapes and sizes. Various styles are finished in a workshop in China that employs disabled seamstresses who are able to develop new vocational skills too.
The handbags, clutches and holdalls then make another journey by air to their glamorous destinations: retailers in Europe, Australia and the USA and then who knows what further adventures they might embark upon, carrying their owner’s passports and flight tickets.
