The story of a swimwear designer who came the long way round. “When she was 16, Tala Raassi went to a party. She talked to boys, and wore a mini-skirt. She was punished with 40 lashes and five days in jail.” That is the beginning of her story, but what happened in the following years is a story far more familiar to our audience, that of a designer trying to figure out how to get into and stay in the business of fashion.

Fashion Is Freedom Author Tala Raassi

The book, Fashion Is Freedom: How a Girl from Tehran Broke the Rules to Change Her World, outlines some of the most common problems young designers face, from working with the wrong partners, to support behind aspirations to be an artist from one parent and not the other, to starting with a t-shirt line, to getting tied up with the lower tier entertainment industry bottom feeders who promise the world and deliver less than advertised (including a certain nightclub-dwelling New York con artist currently running for President of The United States), to hitting the infamous low minimums wall, to crazy international travels with strange people and that universal human connection that transcends spoken language. Directed at women, and especially young girls, the book shows a way through dark and difficult chapters, though an interesting story for just about anyone. It is a cautionary but inspiring tale, well worth the read.

In The Studio

In the studio with American Fashion, Tala goes into more detail about how she solved certain problems, how she started writing opinion pieces about fashion clashes between the Western and Muslim world, and how she finally turned a string of bad luck into dozens of wholesale accounts around the world.

AFP Gets A New Website

This is the first episode of American Fashion Podcast published on our new revamped website on our new domain name, americanfashionpodcast.com. Our new email address is now info@americanfashionpodcast.com.