A bokja is the cloth that wraps what is precious and carries it from one house to another. The wrapping we do ourselves, in Saifi, where Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri have been assembling antique cloth and contemporary silk since 2000. The carrying is the part we rarely get to watch.
Bokja is now at Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, on the floor at ifc mall.
Lane Crawford tells its own story from August 1850, when it opened in a matshed on the waterfront on the north side of Queen's Road and sold to the crews of visiting ships. That makes it older than almost everything in our archive, and it introduces us, in its own words, as a Lebanese house translating a heritage of craftivism and patchwork storytelling into ready-to-wear. It is a strange and lovely thing to read your own life written down accurately by someone eight thousand kilometres away.
What travelled is the ready-to-wear: bralettes and camisoles, dresses, coats and quilted pieces. Each of them carries cloth that had a life before, and stitching done by hand in Beirut, much of it under the hand of Jamil, our master embroiderer. A garment leaves the atelier already full of other people’s histories. Now it goes to a city built on arrival, on cloth and cargo and everybody’s grandmother having come from somewhere else.
Our mark has always been two birds. We chose them a long time ago because migration is the only honest way to describe what we do with fabric: nothing is native, everything has flown, and the beauty is in what settles next to what.
If you are in Hong Kong, Lane Crawford at ifc mall is where to find us. If you are not, the atelier is still here, and a person in Beirut still answers.