For the 44th episode of Kitchen Conversations, host Patrycja Rozwora speaks to Nadira Khalikova, founder of the Uzbek-German fashion label, My Little Bukhara.
My Little Bukhara is a clothing brand born between Bukhara and Stuttgart around 2018. After living in Germany for a couple of years, Nadira decided to visit her family in Uzbekistan. As it soon turned out, the few years spent in Europe changed her perspective on certain things and made her realise aspects of the Uzbek reality that she wasn’t aware of while living there.
What stood out and shocked her the most, was the position of women in the Uzbek society and their inability to live an independent and self-sufficient life due to strong patriarchal structures, still dominating that part of the world. Eventually, the journey back home turned out to be a field trip that later developed into a fashion project celebrating the Central Asian textile-making culture while empowering female craft makers in Bukhara and beyond.
On the podcast, Nadira speaks about the creation of the brand and its three core ideas – empowering the women of Uzbekistan, keeping the Uzbek textile-making culture alive and working toward a sustainable and transparent world of garment-making. During the conversation listeners can learn about ikat – a traditional dyeing technique, suzani – an embroidered and decorative tribal textile as well as the chapan and the duppi – two classic pieces of the Uzbek wardrobe. They are available in the My Little Bukhara online shop and can be worn in combination with contemporary clothing as well.
Following the tradition of Kitchen Conversations, the podcast is finalised by speaking about Nadira’s favourite home food, which in contrast to many, isn’t plow but the large, baked dumplings called samsas.
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