“Lamsa means ‘touch’ in Arabic, and its heart is in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon,” founder and creative director Natalie Garland told me when I asked where her community-based fashion brand, LAMSA, got its name from.
“But why LAMSA as the name, and why the Bekaa Valley as the focus?” I responded.
With smiles on both our faces, Natalie, during an hour-long conversation, explained the full story.
A movement beyond aid
Born and raised in New York City, Natalie moved to Lebanon in 2019 to engage in grassroots activism after spending a few years in Geneva’s top-down aid/research sector.
Around that time, she began working with Syrian refugees and Lebanese artisans through the community-based NGO, Multi Aid Programs (MAPs), in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley — one of the country’s poorest regions, heavily reliant on international aid and home to the highest proportion of refugees per capita globally.
Through her work with MAPs, Natalie developed a critical perspective on the international aid system, witnessing how large-scale humanitarian programmes imposed themselves on refugee communities, stripping them of agency and creating cycles of dependency.
Unlike these programmes, which in Natalie’s eyes fail to create opportunities for refugees to plan for their future or earn a living, MAPs adopts a grassroots approach, empowering individuals to build economic independence instead of solely relying on aid.
That same year, through MAPs, Natalie helped the NGO create the Crochet Community Collective, a project aimed at promoting refugee self-reliance while preserving traditional craft knowledge passed down through generations of women.
“During times of crisis, financial constraints and daily survival pressures, the community was left with little opportunity to practice and learn the craft, so the collective was created to provide training and experiment with a new sustainable model that was not dependent on aid,” Natalie explained, adding that at this time, they were making toys and selling thousands of mini animals across Europe.
Bringing LAMSA to life
Building on the success of the Crochet Community Collective model, Natalie decided to experiment with fashion, a passion of hers, and explore where the vision of her planned LAMSA fashion brand would take her.
As a first step, in the summer of 2021, Natalie travelled to New York, where she sold 100 bags at a pop-up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, before returning to Bekaa to share the news with the artisans, whose enthusiasm confirmed LAMSA’s potential.
By this point, with ten women actively involved, LAMSA had officially taken shape, evolving into a movement focused on supporting livelihoods, using craft as a tool for self-expression, and strengthening a sense of community and belonging.
As Natalie put it, LAMSA strives to strengthen and activate the displaced community, offering an opportunity to earn and create as opposed to being passive recipients of aid.
In the same year, LAMSA took shape, Natalie began her PhD focusing on dignity in displacement. Since then, LAMSA has achieved key milestones, including showcasing LAMSA designs at SS23 London Fashion Week, collaborating with ISHKAR, an online marketplace supporting artisans from conflict-affected countries, and partnering with the New York-based environmental and social justice non-profit, Slow Factory.
A personal, special, and physical touch
For Natalie, LAMSA stands out from other brands for several reasons.
Initially, LAMSA’s designs began as an experiment with colour and pattern, using craft as a way to cope with daily stress and worries. However, over time, the designs evolved to explore the deeper meaning of touch.
As mentioned, Lamsa means ‘touch’ in Arabic, and for Natalie, the brand celebrates the personal touch of the artisan.
“It’s the personal, special, and physical touch of their hands that makes each creation feel unique,” Natalie shared.
She added, “You can have two pieces with the same pattern, but by simply touching them, you can tell one is Ghada’s and the other is Mona’s. Each has a completely distinct feel.”
In making this point, Natalie noted that the concept of touch extends beyond the artisan’s hands.
“It’s also about the touch of the buyer who wears and uses the item. It’s a way to connect these worlds,” Natalie said.
In addition to the sensory element, LAMSA is also unique in the stories it tells.
In the summer of 2024, just before Israel invaded Lebanon, Natalie launched a new collection called Unspoken.
During Israel’s bombardments, Natalie and the artisans found a way to gather and discuss the issues affecting them, asking questions like, “What’s weighing on you right now?” to highlight the hidden injustices and violence faced by the Syrian community in Lebanon, which were overshadowed by the country’s larger crisis.
[Still by David Dawson]
As the discussion unfolded, each woman shared her story; Natalie asked them to translate their experiences into sketches, which she then worked on individually with each artisan, transforming them into designs that used colour and shape to tell their stories.
“This is a different kind of storytelling technique,” Natalie explained. “It’s kind of taking the traditional way of telling stories through craft, but radically rethinking the whole process, and it ended up being something incredibly special.”
Touching on her favourite creations so far for this collection, Broken Dreams stands out to Natalie for its abstract, painting-like design, while Mother and Son — a personal piece by artisan Abeer — captures the struggles of motherhood in forced displacement, with Abeer’s name hand-embroidered inside the bag as a mark of her experience and strength.
Navigating the future
Looking to the future, Natalie is carving out a unique space where grassroots humanitarian action intersects with ethical fashion. She also hopes to stay true to her unconventional approach and not conform to industry standards, while aiming for recognition and planning more collaborations this year.
Natalie is also committed to continuing the development of the Unspoken collection, especially given the shifting geopolitical landscape; with Syria now free of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship and some Syrian refugees planning to return home once they have secured housing, saved enough money, and confirmed that the necessary infrastructure is in place.
As the women prepare for this transition, Natalie is focused on sustaining LAMSA and adapting to the changing circumstances, which she believes will shape its future.
At present, she is actively working on how to navigate these changes moving forward.
If you’d like to purchase a LAMSA crochet item, all artisan designs are available for sale here. All purchases directly support LAMSA’s artisans and help to fund MAPs refugee primary schools across informal tented settlements in the Bekaa Valley.
[Cover photo: Artisan Ghada photographed by Chiara Wettmann]
Zainab Mehdi is The New Arab’s Associate Editor and researcher specialising in governance, development, and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa region
Follow her on X: @zaiamehdi
