Germany, Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, June 21, 2017, Here: Doing a walk in Frankfurt city center.
Reyhane Heidari (left), the 25-year-old Afghan refugee, is working as a seamstress in at the Stitch by Stitch workshop. Reyhane has been able to pick up the threads of her profession in Germany. “Step by step, stitch by stitch,” she says, “you could say I am stitching my life together again. Yes, that’s how it feels.”
Esraa Ali (right), 21, refugee from Damascus, is a trainee, learning all the techniques of sewing clothes and bags. Two days a week, she goes to school but she says she prefers it in the workshop because it is “more practical and more fun”. She is picking up German quickly because the language is the lingua franca between the Arabic-speaking Syrians and Farsi-speaking Afghans.
The Frankfurt fashion workshop >Stitch by Stitch< is an enterprise recently launched by two local designers with the aim producing clothes for small German labels. The all-women workshop, founded by fashion designer Claudia Frick and graphic designer and social entrepreneur Nicole von Alvensleben, employs six refugees and one German seamstress. It is a win-win situation for the refugees, needing jobs, and the workshop, needing staff.