ISLAMABAD: In Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, women work cotton scraps into a traditional form of textile art, called Rilli, a vivid patchwork quilt or bedspread, as they gather in small courtyards of rural homes after long days in the fields.
These women share stories, of love, hardship and resilience, as each stitch turns the fabric waste into heirlooms. It was this spirit of storytelling through sustainable traditional craft that drove Sana Khan to launch, ‘Earthy Murkey,’ a brand of handbags made from discarded fabrics and leather.
In 2019, when Khan, a 42-year-old academician, returned to Pakistan from Australia where she had been working for years as a retail training manager, she was pleasantly surprised by the government’s “no plastic movement,” which discouraged the use of plastic bags in markets.
She recalls that it was something that was being talked about a lot in the West and she was glad that her own country was also taking such important steps toward climate conservation, inspiring her to launch Earthy Murkey.
“So, people started questioning ‘how will we carry groceries etc.?’ So, the idea got inspired from there,” Khan told Arab News. “We just got a bag stitched, it was a simple orange jute bag and introduced it to the market.”
Khan says she had already been thinking of starting such a business and the government’s initiative gave her the push.
In 2021, she expanded her brand to offer a pret line that includes kurtis made from 100 percent cotton and natural dyes, jackets and short shirts fashioned out of rejected fabric, and traditional handicrafts like rilli and block printing, providing livelihood to local artisans.
Khan, who is currently the head of Fashion and Textile department at Iqra University in Islamabad, also renamed her zero-waste clothing brand ‘Dhundli Zameen,’ which translates to Murkey Earth.
Today, she is not only reviving artisanal crafts, but also challenging the very DNA of Pakistan’s fashion industry.
“We are made-to-order [brand],” she said, gesturing to a hand-dyed kurta behind her. “One [such] piece can take 15 to 20 days just to develop before stitching.”
In fast fashion, she says, people are used to instant gratification, but slow fashion is about patience that gives one “something timeless.”
Khan recalls struggling to make sales for the first six months, but then the COVID-19 lockdowns came, and people started discovering and aligning with our “zero-waste fashion movement.”
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic which was followed by two-year lockdowns across the world. Around the same time, Khan noticed a cultural shift: friends swapping processed food for organic produce, trying yoga, or questioning chemical-laden products.
“That mindset change was a win-win for us,” she said, speaking of the time she decided to launch the clothing line. “People began to value raw products and we began turning raw textiles into wearable art.”
Khan told Arab News that her team sources rejected fabrics from various mills and converts them into fusion jackets and short kurtis, saving them from being diverted to landfills.
In their workshop in Bhit Shah, a town in Sindh’s Matiari district where the ancient art of indigo dyeing dating back to the Indus Valley civilization (lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE) still thrives, they use vegetable, spice and food dyes to craft eco-friendly clothes.
REVIVING THE CRAFT
For Khan, sustainability is inseparable from heritage preservation. She has traveled through Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and beyond to rediscover dying crafts like the chikankari embroideries of Multan and the appliqué rillies of Larkana.
“These crafts are part of our generational cultivation,” she said. “But industrial capitalism pushed them into the background. We’re trying to bring them forward again.”
CLIMATE CONNECTION
From landfill contamination to mangrove destruction caused by synthetic dye runoff in Karachi’s Qur'angi industrial zone, Khan links Pakistan’s textile waste to environmental degradation.
Pakistan is one of the dumping grounds for post-consumer textile waste i.e. unwanted clothes discarded annually from the European Union, according to a research by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics. In 2021, used clothing valued at $46 million was exported from the EU to Pakistan, reaching resale markets and dumping sites in the country.
“It is in human nature,” Khan said. “First, we destroy ourselves. Then, when we hit a breaking point, we start trying to heal. But we can’t wait until the damage is irreversible.”
A recent study by the British Council on ‘Mapping Sustainable Fashion Ecosystem in Pakistan’ found that Pakistan’s fashion and textile sectors along with their agricultural and industrial supply chains are “predominantly unsustainable.” As a significant supplier of textiles to western fashion labels and importer of discarded clothing, Pakistan disproportionately absorbs the environmental and social costs of global fashion production.
But for Khan, the goal is clear: smaller production runs, better fabric quality, more natural dyes, and garments designed to “last a lifetime,” or even to be passed down from generation to generation.
“We’ve had 200 years of fast fashion,” Khan told Arab News. “It will take at least 40 or 50 years to fully understand slow fashion again. But I see hope in Gen Z, they’re more conscious about what they wear, what they eat, what they put on their skin.”
