Fatiha Makloufi and Regina Farrell-Fagan

White Plains resident Fatiha Makloufi discusses her inspiration for starting a clothing design business in New York City as well as her connection to a long lineage of independent seamstresses in Algeria, her place of origin. This interview was recorded on February 10th, 2020 at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, NY.

Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, Regina Farrell-Fagan reflects on her grandmother's rag rugs, her passion for embroidery, and and the history of lace in Irish and Irish-American communities.  This interview was recorded on February 20th, 2020, at the Clay Arts Center in Port Chester, NY.
For podcast audio with images go to ArtsW's YouTube Channel

Music: https://www.purple-planet.com

Sewing Community is part of ArtsWestchester's Folk Arts Program, made possible in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.   

Transcript

01:30
My name is Fatiha Makloufi, and I’m originally from Algeria. We came here in 1979. That’s quite a long time. I live in White Plains. I stumbled into fabric and the joy of fabric when I started a small business. It was in the 1980s. I was a part-time teacher at a college, a professor of ESL. And I was raising a young son. I wanted something that I could do to make some money and I stumbled into a community of artists. It was an African-American community, Caribbean community, and Latino community that used to be very engaged in validating art that came from the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, Africa, the Middle East. ( [They were] Small start-ups…people who felt empowered to start small businesses. I felt really energized by that idea, so I started getting fabric from Africa and I started thinking of creating clothes out of that. I worked with a group of people who were in Brooklyn, who were really tailors from Africa, who had just come and were looking to work. So we started a workshop. I would design the clothes and they would create the clothes I wanted. And then I started selling these clothes at outside fairs. I had a little stand in Queens at one of the malls. I started being a part of the Harlem fairs with fabric and clothes and I was also part of the big Caribbean festival in Brooklyn and I was selling stuff there. And it started connecting. It was very synergetic.  

My designs were very classy but also symbolic. They had the booboo…the African booboo. I also had the pants, the Algerian pants…the open long pants with the wide legs. My clothes also integrated beading. I would have t-shirts that would be tie-dyed and I would then create fringes with beads. I had created all these ideas of beading.

The Algerian family, the  typical Algerian family…when I was growing up, people were very resourceful. They would create things out of nothing. So for example, my mother always a quilter. At the end of each season, any clothes that we didn’t wear, she would repurpose our clothes into a quilt for the winter. She canned. She grew her own food. So I learned a lot from my mother and the women around my mother. My mother was not really a seamstress, but the whole family on my mother’s side…they were really seamstresses. They made a living out of that. Whenever you  visited them, there were people in and out, trying clothes. They were preparing for the next wedding, the next festival…they were constantly sewing. 

Every bride had to have a trousseau so that was a big source of income for my aunts. They would prepare these clothes. And every woman had to have this set of clothes that were traditional and fancy. There was a lot of laces and beadings. A lot of hand woven stuff. Layering of clothes and different textures. There was a lot of that. These aunts also looked at what was the fashion and they stayed up to date on what was also up to date. 

…Of making a living out of your hands, out of your own skills…that was very powerful for me. Women in Algeria, at that point, didn’t really work. But in my mother’s family, these women all worked. They made a living out of these clothes. So that was fascinating for me to see these independent women. They bought their cars and they had their own homes and they took care of their family and everything. They had this skill. You can take care of yourself, if you have a skill. If you have a skill, start small and build on it. That’s the community that I had stumbled into. I met these tailors who were making a living, they built on it. These women who were seamstresses, they took care of their whole family. It was just fascinating for me. 

06:00
My name is Regina Farrell-Fagan and I am from Dublin, Ireland and I am the exhibitions manager at Clay Arts Center.  My connection to fabric comes from my grandmother on my father’s side.  She used to collect all the clothing in the house that nobody was wearing anymore, she never threw anything out, and she would cut it into long strips and then she would sew these strips in the rugs – they were called rag rugs. Then she would use them in the house.  There was no rhyme or reason to the pattern, she would just randomly throw blocks of color together and sometimes she would surround the color with a ring of another color and then there were different patterns.  I think about them a lot because it took me a long time to realize that they were her down time…that she wasn’t just being frugal but that she was actually relaxing. I sew.  She also sewed.  She used to mend all of her socks and stuff, which again I thought was a boring old person thing to do, but that’s what she did, that’s how they grew up – mending all of their clothes everything got stitched everything got fixed. Now I sew. I do bead embroidery. Besides being a ceramicist, when I do the bead embroidery it’s the most relaxing thing.  People say to me “my god how do you have the patience for it?” Now that I am a parent, and my time is so limited, I really can connect with my grandmother and why she was so into making the rag rugs – I totally understand it.  

When I came here first, I found it a little hard to connect.  I worked with a non-profit organization and I taught art programs in an Irish community and there were a lot of Irish-Americans in the community.  Sometimes they would talk about traditional things that I did not grow up with because Ireland had evolved long past when their people left Ireland and came here.  I started researching it and one of the things that I found out was that a lot of the women that came to American, probably in the late 1700, early 1800, brought lace making traditions with them. We had a cottage industry, a lace making cottage industry in Ireland that was really big at one point and people made very fine laces and there were tradition patterns.  They brought those skills to New York with them and it was a form of employment here where lace was still very popular on clothing and accessories and things like that.  Sometimes in the whole household people would know how to make lace, and pass down different stitches. I think the Italian community also did the same thing and at one point the Italian community surpassed the Irish population who were making lace and then of course it died out completely.  I know of a place in Northern Ireland that is a museum of lace making.  They have a lot of specimens there and they preserve the tradition. I have met people here whose parents would have done it – people now, I suppose, in their 80s.  I know a lot of people who do crochet. A lot of the lace was crochet-based as well.   Very fine Irish lace that is done with crochet.  When my son was born 5 years ago, I got a lot of handmade items from that community because I used to work with them very closely, and a lot of people gave me beautiful hand made things that were so precious.