Moja Majka: Journey of a kaftan

Moja Majka is a unique kaftan and abaya brand by half-Turkish half-Saudi fashion designer Sarah Basaad and her mother, Sureyya Barli Basaad. They decided to go hand to hand and mix a little old with a lot of new.
With Sureyya’s etamines and Sarah’s vision, they came up with brand Moja Majka. Authentic, free spirited, beautifully crafted, luxurious, boho-chic, this clothing line consists of mainly kaftans and separates.
The mother-daughter project started when Sureyya’s mother died in Turkey three years ago and she used to pray on beads. Sarah asked her mother to attach to the beads a small handmade embroidery that her grandmother used to make. This reminded Sureyya of her mother while a beautiful art piece was also created. “It has symbolized patience and endless love for both my mother and I, and that’s when we started appreciating handcrafts,” said Sarah. “Our work is an appreciation of women around the world who create things with patience and love. Women and mothers who poured their feelings in their hopes, dreams, tears of happiness and sorrow for their kids and loves ones,” she added.
To both Sarah and Sureyya, their work is a dedication to all the nameless heroes that made it even more valuable and sentimental. “We poured all these feelings in and stirred it up with life’s colors and present it with love, only for you,” she added.
Sureyya then started making more such pieces for family and friends, when people started loving the concept of styling their praying beads. However, then they had to return to the Kingdom.
“I remember it was the exact time when Amy Winehouse died and the song ‘Back to Black’ was being played around in her memory. To me, it represented the black abaya and I was going back to black abaya in Saudi,” said Sureyya. “This made me design my own colorful abaya, adding to it a touch of my mother's embroidery. It was a linen blue abaya and the embroidery was on the front,” she added.
Word of mouth pushed the designer duo to make more abayas and go beyond their circle of family and friends. “We used to have a small corner in our house where we presented our abaya collection for all those who wanted to see and buy,” she said. “We first sold our abayas in a Jeddah-based boutique.
Moja Majka is Montenegrin for “My mother”. It is the mother tongue of Sureyya, who is originally from Yugoslavia. “We are a blend between Turkey, Saudi and Slovakia and our designs show that we are inspired by arts and culture. The name represents the real story of how we started the brand, which is because of my grandmother, who is the real reflection of the brand,” said Sarah. “We don’t follow certain trends; we come up with our own fashion concepts where we obtain our inspiration from a different culture each year and this year, it is Turkey,” she added.
The process of making abayas is an extremely fun process for both. Sureyya and her daughter travel together and take long road trips to visit small villages in Turkey to help put together the abaya collection. “We did not want to use all my grandmother’s crochet embroidery so we traveled around different villages to find those hand-made Sirma, gold and silver embroideries, as well as crochets and made the women in the village our suppliers,” she said. “We wanted something that really represents the culture so we found a fabric factory that produces all our linens and we made our designs 100 percent authentic and a true reflection of the culture with a twist of modern,” she added.
You can tell that all those garments were made with love, its all in the details and warm colors. You can see the small pieces of hand-stitched crochet falling from the shoulder past the neckline on the right side. The designers play well with fabrics and colors making each kaftan a statement piece. Sarah studied fashion design in Florence, Italy and then taught what she learned to fashion students in Jeddah for three years. Her background in fashion has equipped her with all the skills needed to make a successful fashion brand that pays close attention to small details, matching colors and fabrics.
“The collection is colorful, feminine and casual at the same time. We want a woman to feel comfortable and unique knowing no one else has the same piece but her. Each piece is different in terms of colors, stitching and prints,” she said. “Even the printed fabric is handmade, where a woman in a small village in Turkey carves pieces of wood in different shapes and hand prints our fabrics,” she added.
Moja Majka is about to launch their Ramadan collection using Arabic inspired crochet and embroideries mixed with light-colored fabrics, with a dash of gold sirma.

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