From blue collar to haute couture: Paris fashion workshop builds bridges

In a small Parisian factory a world away from the glitz and glamour of Fashion Week, four African-born garment workers have brought their creative visions to life with outfits they designed and stitched themselves.

Their work is the product of a collaboration between their Mode Estime workshop and About A Worker, a fashion label co-founded in 2016 by design student Kim Hou and inspired by the blue collar outfits worn by manual labourers in France and elsewhere. The label's first collection - called "Saint-Denis" after the Paris suburb where the workshop is located – launched in the French capital in 2017.

Its creators, Fadila Boubekeur, Kira Ghoul, Aissatou Gakou and Misbahou Yssouf, are all immigrants, some of whom worked in the garment industry in their home countries and who are employed by Mode Estime at the minimum wage on three-year contracts. "You get to know their personal stories but also you get to see how they can get empowered by a project, and that's the most important (thing) I think," Hou, 25, told Reuters.

"...Most of the time they feel undervalued, I would say, and at the bottom of the chain, when actually they are probably the most important people in fashion." Yssouf, 33, is a refugee from the Comoros Islands who came to France after losing a foot in his country's civil war in 2008.

The jacket he has created draws on that experience, its sleeve emblazoned with a picture of a Kalashnikov rifle, the weapon that crippled him. "I took refuge in fashion after everything I endured in my life," he said. Algerian Fadila Boubekeur, 64, is from a family of craftsmen and would watch her mother make outfits. By becoming a designer she achieved a childhood dream.

"I started as a simple worker," she said. "Kim came along and presented us with her project... and then we started to create, to invent things, from the past, from the present." Printed on the interior of the jacket she crafted is a picture of her and a short description of her life.

About A Worker has partnerships with two French stores and a Japanese showroom, but Hou has bigger ambitions. She hopes to take her project to countries such as China, Bangladesh and India, to collaborate directly with sweatshop workers and help make the fashion industry more ethical.

(reporting by Julien Pretot; editing by John Stonestreet)