By Mattias Sparrow

She'd burst
Dropped off
Pick the fruit
Realize
I'm naked
I'm naked too

So cover my body
Dress it fine
Hide my linen and leaves
Been sewing ever since
Since time began

More than the hills
More than the trees
More than the mountains, you
More than I can see
In front of me
More than the mountains, you

So fruit flower myself inside out
I'm happy and bleeding for you
Fruit flower myself inside out
I'm tired and I'm bleeding for you

-P.J. Harvey

Afshan Durrani [top left] is standing, maybe five feet four inches, barefoot, occupying the entire space between two mod red leather sofas. She’s on the wall, traditional jewelry in a black and white photo. Behind the steel coffee table and framed by four-foot speakers which we will hear from later, she beckons.

I stand there with her talking about EGO until we finally sit down. I face her from the depths of the couch. She perches on the armrest. “Ego” she says, gesturing, “is good because there is no specified format…no rules.” No rules, I write, envisioning this article dripping across the paper like one of the Ghazals printed across her drapes. From his position on her shirt, Bob Dylan agrees: “For people who don’t really follow rules”.

Afshan is fond of breaking rules. She is not a ‘rebel’ in the traditional sense, but a sensual subversive, the owner and lead designer of Lost City, a company that produces couture fabric and upholstery. She’s designing her way back to the Mogul Renaissance and infusing it with her punk ethos.

This is no easy task.

“I’ve been away from India so long”, she explains. “It’s hard to find your way around because you don’t know how to go about things.” But as Afshan describes the challenges she faced beginning the day she arrived in Lucknow, India, her eyes brighten. “ I was there for three months and came back with ten samples. It became an adventure. So I quit my job as a designer for children’s clothing, which I hated…I quit to work on my collection. I just walked out and never went back.”

Now, four years after her sudden start, Afshan has a staff of 50, showrooms in New York and San Francisco. She’ll soon be in Chicago and L.A. Her company, Lost City, just completed a project with Four Seasons New York, and they’re doing the penthouse with Peter Marino. “That was a big kick,” she giggles, “because they actually love our work and think our quality is superlative.”

For Afshan, the Mogul period is a constant inspiration. “It’s been a rich time,” she says, her English grammar betraying her linguistic roots “and a lot of stuff that you see around you, even in India, in architecture, art, in clothing, it’s beautiful. You have to go back to that. Everything else is derivative from that period. All the rich costumes you see now come from that period. Before that there was really nothing. It was the renaissance of India.”

To authentically recapture the techniques of the Mogul period, Afshan hunted down the few remaining artisans who still practice the art of hand embroidery, which has been handed down through the generations. “People don’t go back and focus on getting to that quality. A lot of what comes out of India is not hand embroidered. It’s hand guided which means it’s been done on a machine,” she says. “.There is no product out there right now where everything is a manual process.”

Lost City is a return to that tradition, in a refined and modern form; Afshan is putting the ‘art’ back into ‘artisan’. “The people working with me now know that this is what we have to do to make it. Even if it takes a long time. It took six months to do the fabric for two chairs. It’s really couture upholstery, I would say.” Couture upholstery. Emporio Duranni. Has a nice ring to it.

I hesitate, then, mumbling, ask “But why Lost City? What does it all mean?” Afshan looks pained. “It’s about things getting lost,” she says, eyes closing. “Not just embroidery, but values, craftsmanship and many things that are hard to hold onto. So I’m trying to bring them back in a way.”

“You don’t have to bring things back exactly as they were,” she continues, her eyes opening and focusing intensely, “The technique we use is ancient. We present a product in a way that is modern and accessible. People understand it. They can think it’s beautiful without having to understand its origins. People can relate to the product because they think it’s beautiful.”

Many people find Mogul period embroidery beautiful. Many designers return to their roots for inspiration. Few entrepreneurs do business with such care for the people and places that manufacture their products. (Afshan provides financial security for her employees, most of whom live in India, and education for their children.) I want to know where these values come from.

At first Afshan doesn’t know how to answer my question.

She stumbles…

"My dad and mother. They’re both doctors. They live in Kashmir. Over the past 10 years, since the whole movement started, things changed completely. It’s not the same place anymore. My dad just stuck to his beliefs. He didn’t want to move from there. I spoke to him recently about this, saying ‘why don’t you move from there?’. It’s very dangerous there. I go back every year and I don’t know how they live there. His thing was ‘I am doing what I’m doing here. I’m serving a lot of poor people in need here.’ He’s just this humane person.”

Then she tells me a story.

“Eight years ago my mother had this woman who was married to a terrorist. These are everyday situations. She came to my mother for a delivery. She didn’t want the child and she was about to deliver. The man with this woman was her new husband. The old husband had died. He was a militant. The new husband did not want the other husband’s child. They asked my mother to arrange for the child to be given to an orphanage. This woman did not have much of a say in the situation. My mom delivered the baby and they left the baby and said ‘we’ll be back.’ They took the woman away. You just don’t get up and walk out after a delivery. They said ‘we’re just coming back.’ They left the child and they did not come back. My mother is now with this baby. She called me and said she did not know what to do.” She smiles, thinking of her adopted brother, barely older than her own daughter. “That baby is now 8 years old and he is with my parents. At that time she called and said that she was going to keep this baby. It was one of those things that happened with her. She kind of knew and was prepared for it.”

Afshan Durrani is subversive and caring even in her approach to business. “I don’t really have a business plan. It’s there but not set in stone. It’s a constantly evolving process.” The Polk Pillars start humming a low Depeche Mode remix and, as I turn my head to see who has turned on the music, my eye stops on the P.J. Harvey lyrics undulating across the drapes. EGO looks forward to following Afshan’s evolution, to tracing the success of one punk Mogul entrepreneur.

For more information, please visit the Lost City website

Photos by Nusrat Durrani