“Explain your aesthetic in one or two words,” I ask.
“I like symmetry. I’m a very logically-minded person, so I like things to be balanced and to make sense. I love earth color palettes. I love things that are the same color as some primordial element, like, I don’t know, water and sand and dirt and crystals—I sound like Stevie Nicks. I would say primordial and symmetrical,” she answers.
Jesse is sitting at her kitchen table in a turquoise leather chair; her fringed, suede leather jacket, also turquoise, is hung on the chair’s back. Her shirt, a hand-beaded and sequined vintage find is draping loosely, her black jeans are snug and high-waisted, modestly accentuating the tiny waist, delicate curves, and petite frame they’re covering. She’s just handed me a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “I consistently like the same type of things, and it all kind of relates back to my childhood and where I grew up in the mountains of Colorado. Every family camping trip was to some Indian pueblos in the middle of nowhere. I’m really inspired by the Southwest and by the desert and by Native American crafts. I love cactuses and feathers.”
Jesse Meighan’s naturaliste and environmentally conscious upbringing has prepared her well for the success she’s found as Manager of Business and acting Chief Operations Officer of A Peace Treaty, a textile and accessories brand dedicated to empowering local artisans from socioeconomically depressed regions of the world through long-term fair-trade, hand-made textile design practices that not only bring nearly defunct art forms to the sightlines and closets of those in more affluent and developed parts of the first world, but also help to restructure and re-establish long term, sustainable business operations in the underperforming and impoverished neighborhoods from which they came. “The idea behind it is that each collection sort of resurrects an ancient hand technique, whether it’s knitting or embroidery or hand dying or block printing or screen printing or stone carving—different types of working with materials that are dying out in favor of machine labor and factory labor and all these kinds of things that are taking over. It’s the little human mistakes that become the things you love, those are my favorite things about the scarves and jewelry from A Peace Treaty. What we avoid is going and buying ready made things and slapping our label on and tripling the price, because there is plenty of that going on.”
Fresh off their first collection with an American artist, Jesse and A Peace Treaty founders Farah Mallik and Dana Arbib are looking next towards Africa, and at the potential to expand their “trade not aid” philosophies to a new continent. “We’ve never wanted to be a massive brand. I think to do what we do on a large scale is a little bit impossible and I think we want to keep it a sort of a manageably small company so that we can really expand in our project and what we’re doing, that’s where we want to grow. We worked with a group called Afghan Hands and we did a project with widows in Afghanistan whose husbands were mostly killed by the Taliban, and they are widowed young and they have children and they have no way to support their families, so [Afghan Hands] sort of finds work for these women. One of the things that they have is a group of woman that’s really good at embroidery, so we did a whole collection in Afghanistan of embroidered scarfs that was really, really beautiful and really incredible and each scarf took 5 to 8 days to embroider and it was one woman who would do it and at the end she would embroider her name on the scarf and she would cut a piece of her burka and attach it to the scarf and it’s a symbol of her slow liberation, the piece she cuts. How touching his that? How amazing is it to own something like that? And that’s the whole reason. Every time someone appreciates something as much as we put into making it, it feels like everything has come full circle, like we found a home and it’s in the right hands and I think that’s the ultimate hope, that people can have it for a long time and feel that way about it.”
