Workshop

DARLAMAN is, at its heart, a living, breathing community of workshops and quiet brilliance, a constellation of skilled hands and generational know-how woven across borders and backstreets, courtyards and kilns.

Garments

In our main workshop in Islamabad, fourteen full-time artisans, tailors, pattern-cutters, and embroiderers come together each day. All are refugees. Each supports a household, often extended families. And so, the impact of every garment stretches far beyond the seams into kitchens, schoolbooks, and the lives of the next generation.

Embroidery

Alongside them is a network of sixty women who embroider from their homes. Some are single mothers; others are not permitted to leave the house. But through DARLAMAN, their needlework travels far. With every stitch, they gain both income and quiet authority. Respect within their families grows. So too does their sense of agency. It is a subtle kind of freedom embroidered into being.

Glassware

Our hand-blown glassware is made in Herat, Afghanistan, by one of the last families still practising this fragile and ancient art. Generations have shaped flame and sand into delicate vessels — and today, we work with them not only to share their pieces with the world but to help safeguard the survival of a craft that is all but vanishing.

Weaving

In the mountains of Badakhshan, a textile designer weaves for us. His loom is the heartbeat of a small village, where the entire community participates spinning, dyeing, weaving until a bolt of cloth emerges, dense with history and human warmth. By working with him, we don’t just support an individual artisan; we help sustain a village.

Ceramics

In Sindh, our ceramics are made by a family studio steeped in the traditions of Kashigari the centuries-old art of hand-painted tilework and glazed pottery, brought from Persia and made deeply local through Sindhi colour and rhythm. At DARLAMAN, we honour this heritage while adding our own Central Asian-inflected design sensibility. Together, we experiment creating new styles that feel both timeless and entirely our own. Each piece is a dance between form and function, geometry and instinct, legacy and innovation.

and more to come

We are also developing our own block prints working with a studio in Karachi, and soon, we hope, establishing a block-printing centre in the north of Pakistan, where training and artistry can take root side by side.

Soon, we will begin a new collaboration with a group of young Afghan women, many of them orphans, who will stitch traditional dresses and fine embroidery. With each design, they will reclaim the stories of their foremothers and reimagine what their own futures might look like.

In time, we hope to work in stone, in wood, in brass and bone, whatever medium allows memory and handcraft to meet. The vision is not only to grow our own workshops but to nurture others.

Across each of these collaborations from glass to garment, embroidery to earth, we work together to create objects in our own distinct DARLAMAN style: a contemporary interpretation of Afghan and Central Asian traditions, modern in spirit, rooted in heritage.

DARLAMAN is not a single space. It is a network. A collective. A quiet resistance to forgetting. A celebration of what the hands remember.

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