A Beautiful Rebellion

Fashion designer Tala Raassi literally suffered for her art.

In the May issue of Marie Claire magazine, a young designer named Tala Raassi relates her nightmarish tale of being arrested in Iran for wearing "indecent" clothing (a miniskirt) to a private party celebrating her sweet 16th birthday. The teenager was held in handcuffs for 5 days, repeatedly threatened, and ultimately received her sentence - 40 lashes from a wet whip ("to make the lashes sting").

There's a memory that has defined my life: I'm standing in line in a long, dark hallway, handcuffed to a friend, while listening to the horrifying sound of two other friends screaming out in pain. I'm in jail in Iran's capital, Tehran, and I'm about to be served my punishment: 40 lashes. My friends emerge from a room down the hall, tears streaming down their faces and blood staining the backs of their shirts. I can barely breathe as I wait for the guards to call my name. Finally, it's my turn. My friend and I, still cuffed, enter the torture room together...

What's truly amazing about this story, aside from what the Western mind can see as nothing but senseless brutality, is what Raassi did after she was released. Born into a well-to-do family, Raassi had planned to attend law school one day. But the torture she endured changed the course of her life. She began to consider a career which would allow her to take a stand against the brutality and oppression of women she experienced so personally. She moved to the U.S. (where she was born and is therefore a dual citizen) and entered the world of women's fashion. Today Raassi is the owner of the internationally acclaimed Dar Be Dar fashion line - a line of super-sexy swimwear. As she so eloquently puts it, "A woman who cares about herself is not afraid to celebrate the beauty of her own body."


At the risk of comparing myself to the incomparable, I confess that a part of me can empathize with Raassi's experience of the impossible situation. Even here in the United States, women are daily faced with such paradoxes of will -  be socially acceptable and maintain your peaceful existence, or else be true to your own genuine will and learn that, at the very least, you will not often be loved for it. On a much smaller scale, my own entry into the world of design resulted from a similar realization. Having spent the lion's share of my of my adult life as a career social worker, I once believed in the ideals that trap so many with their overly-simplified promises of the ultimately "Just World Theory" - the belief that, essentially, everything ultimately happens with just cause, and it all evens out in the end. After all, if Raassi had just worn pants, she wouldn't have been lashed, right?


As such, I dedicated not just my time but my very soul to the social service system, believing that it was this system that ultimately provided justice (usually in the form of meeting basic essential needs) to those poor souls who had somehow slipped between the cracks of a just world. A family of four is homeless? Send them to a shelter. A child is doing drugs? Send him to drug diversion classes. A woman is ill and uninsured? Send her to social security disability. I had an answer for everything. But the longer I worked in the system, the larger the cracks seemed to be. 3 million Americans are homeless. 1 out of every 10 teenagers in the U.S. uses illicit drugs. Over 46 million Americans lack health insurance. Eventually I became so overwhelmed by the unmet needs of so many people that I ceased to be able to separate myself from my work.


Ultimately, my body rebelled from the combination of overwork and exposure to so much disease (remember, those who are uninsured are much more likely to catch and spread contagious illnesses, and I worked with uninsured clients every day). Every system in my body began to break down. I couldn't fight off even minor infections, I was always exhausted, and my days became a blur of physical pain and mental frustration. I lost my job when I requested a reduction in hours, and so of course I lost my insurance soon after. Suddenly, I was the poor soul without insurance being referred to social security disability. I knew from working with clients that this was not an ideal system, but I was soon to learn just how broken it really was. Over the next five years - while fighting for my life - I was denied over and over, racked up enormous medical debt, and worst of all for me, was treated like a pariah by the larger society. While celebrating one July 4th - a good day for me - I was able to get out of bed and sit on my front lawn with my neighbors to watch the fireworks. But the evening was overcast, and all we could see was a vague blush of oranges and blues in the fog while fireworks exploded unseen over the water. As we were commenting on the cost of the largely invisible display, one neighbor tuned to me and said with all sincerity, "Well, at least they didn't waste it on welfare moms."


That moment was my true education, the moment I realized that I had been towing the party line for a society that considered helping young, impoverished mothers (and their children) afford food and shelter to be less valuable than fireworks that nobody could see. I discovered the hard way that we - you and I - are "those poor souls;" that it is but for the grace of God or sheer dumb luck any of us manages to avoid the same sad fate.


I imagine that Tala Raassi might have had a similar realization, if entirely more immediate and terrifying, while waiting for her turn to be tortured in that hallway; that rather than embrace the beauty and joy of their own youngsters joining together to celebrate life, her society would prefer to whip them into brutalized submission just because they could. She must have felt she had an impossible choice to make - maintain her society's standards and therefore reinforce its brutal oppression, or leave her home to create an entirely new life for herself without any assurance of support or success. When it comes down to it, Raassi's decision took her unforgivable tragedy and transformed it into beauty - not just in her designs, but the beauty of a strong, empowered woman who shaped her own better world from pieces of a painful past. Her story is an inspiration for women (and the men who love them) of every society.

Katy Perry's Dress's Clock Is Ticking

Katy Perry's Dress's Clock Is Ticking

Katy Perry and Her Egg-celent Dress

If I could only read one snarky website, it would hands down be GoFugYourself, because I'm a firm believer that we learn best by making mistakes...and also I love schadenfreude. Take for example Katy Perry's frock at some ASCAP event. On top it just looks like grey and neon pink polka dots, which seems kinda' fitting for Perry's aesthetic, but follow on down the waterfall of ova and realize that she spent the entire evening wading through a cloud of tiny little eggs just WAITING to be fertilized and grow into - apparently - neon pink chickens. I feel that dress's pain.

In The Beginning...

...There was a small family in New Orleans - just one of many in the days after Hurricane Katrina - looking for a new path, a new community, a new life. Looking, in fact, for what has come to be known here as "Rebirth." This family moved to the city about 6 months after the hurricane in the hopes of helping to breathe new life into a community in desperate need, which is fitting because it was a desperate move. To say that we weren't getting along very well would be an understatement. Words like "divorce" were bandied about almost casually, and we had little hope of our situation improving soon on any front. There was no trash removal. Mail delivery was inconsistent at best. The apartment building we moved into had a partially fallen-in roof, and vines climbing up the south side of the building twined their way into window spaces with no windows remaining, through cracks in the ceiling and holes in the walls and floorboards. Air conditioning? Ha ha ha ha ha! Outside the building, the rest of the city was largely and eerily silent. Felled trees still blocked many roads, and potholes that hadn't been repaired in years became pot-ponds. Our family had left Los Angeles and entered a new life in surroundings more reminiscent of a third world country than a thriving American port city.


When people asked us, "Why would you want to move there?" I was never sure how to answer them. In truth, the answer probably depended on the moment the question was asked. Sometimes I replied that we were shocked by the lack of government aid provided to the city running the nation's third largest port, and we wanted to help revitalize its economy. Sometimes I replied that my husband, who had lived here previously (I had only visited twice), always wanted to return to the Big Easy. Sometimes I just replied that Los Angeles had become too expensive, and never really sat right with us anyway. I never said "I don't," but sometimes I thought it.


Several years later, I realize that I had never known how to respond to such a question because I hadn't yet met the answer. The answer laid with the cab driver who drove us around the city when we had only one day to find and rent an apartment, and then gave us his cell phone number in case we needed anything after we moved in. It laid with the teller at the local bank who helped me to open an account, despite the fact that I had neither the correct paperwork nor much of anything to deposit. It laid with the guys who delivered our furniture (up three stories of a rotting-out winding staircase in the kind of humidity that even drowns mosquitoes) and then refused to accept a tip or delivery fee, saying instead "Thank you for coming here. You won't regret it." It laid with the restaurant owner who offered a job sight unseen. Today, when people ask me why we moved to New Orleans, the answer is easy. We moved here for a lot of reasons - some noble, some sketchy, some extremely ill considered. But we stayed for only one reason: We stayed for the people.


New Orleans is a community unlike any other in the U.S.  European architecture, Southern food and hospitality, thriving artist boroughs, live music endeavors, and warm sunshine and flowers are all wonderful perks...but the sense of neighborhood, of community, of a shared history and -what's better - a shared future; the NEED to celebrate life under even the most dire circumstances...that's what New Orleans is all about.


Four years after we moved here to New Orleans nearly as shell-shocked as the residents who lived through the storm, our city's Saints played for the title of National Champions.  Having recently settled into a new home with a kind of family stability I had never before known, I was seeking a kind of "rebirth" for my own career.  With a master's degree in social work, I had always assumed that one way or another I would be a career social worker. Unfortunately (or perhaps serendipitously) an illness prevented me from finding regular work in the city. I had fallen into the trap of sitting around and feeling sorry for myself, when - in a turn of the tables so unlikely that I should have seen it coming - New Orleans once again swept through my taciturn life, set me upright, and gave me a good swift kick in the rump. I'd been saying offhand for years that I wanted to start a jewelry company, the way most people say they're going to write the Great American Novel. Needing to make a few extra bucks, I made another impetuous, foolhardy, poorly considered decision. I emptied the checking account which I should never have been able to open in the first place to buy up an armload of black and gold beads, and I started making bracelets.


To this day I don't know how I got the gumption to walk into that first boutique with absolutely nothing to recommend me and say "Hey, want to buy some jewelry? It's black an gold!" For that I can only credit the New Orleans Saints, because I knew one thing with absolute certainty - the Saints were going to win the Superbowl. It was inevitable. I could see clearly that the same hurricane of destiny and emotion that brought my family to New Orleans and forced us to pull together come hell or (literally) high water was sweeping through the Superdome. In reality, I suppose they could have lost, and I could have been an armload's worth of black and gold beads the poorer. But the thought honestly never crossed my mind. All I could think was "How many bracelets/earrings/necklaces can I make in the next two weeks?"


So I did walk into that boutique (thank you Fleurty Girl!) and I did sell the jewelry. I like to think it was my delightful design aesthetic that moved it, but frankly it would have had to be poisonous not to sell...shops couldn't keep anything black and gold on the shelves. I left about 10 items the first day, and got a call the next day for 5 more, and 5 more the day after, and so it went.


Who do I credit with the birth of what has since become a family design business? I suppose I could take the credit myself, or credit the boutique (which certainly deserves at least a hearty thanks and the right of first refusal forever onward), or even the New Orleans Saints, because they had as much to do with my success as I did, if not more. But in reality, I think I have to credit the people of New Orleans, including my family, because I know something now that I didn't know four years ago. I know that this city would have bought up every piece of black and gold memorabilia on the shelves even if the Superbowl had gone the other way... because this is New Orleans, and we support our own.


And that's the story of the beginning of Kalla Designs.