It's always a treat to discover a local brand whose chic travels well. In Beirut, fashionistas with a social conscience make their way to Sarah's Bag, the atelier of Lebanese designer and women's-rights activist Sarah Beydoun, where they can pick up evening bags, clutches, and carryalls hand-beaded with Arabic calligraphy or printed with pop images including retro advertising slogans, graffiti, or celebrity icons such as Egyptian diva Oum Khalthoum.
Based in an Art Deco apartment building in the neighborhood of Ashrafiyeh, the 11-year-old enterprise is a bankable skills-development scheme for about 150 women from underprivileged backgrounds, including many former and current prisoners at Lebanon's two main women's jails in Baabda and Tripoli. Marginalized by prison life and shunned when they return home, many continue working for Beydoun after leaving jail as a way to earn dignity as well as a livelihood.
Beydoun first studied the female criminal underworld while a student at Lebanon's St. Joseph University, where she wrote a thesis on the reintegration of former prostitutes and felons back into society. Expressing Lebanon's seize the day esprit, her newest line makes use of gold-plated champagne corks as pendants, rings, and clutch fasteners. Prices start at $30 for a leather wrist purse printed with vintage Beirut postcards.
(100 Liban Street, Mhanna Building, Ashrafieh; +961-1-575585; Sarahsbag.com)