Tailoring and Fashion Daily Being in Liberia

Those new sewing machines had to be set up, and techniques in how to cut indigenous Fanti cloth had to be taught. None of Ms. Bernard’s new employees had ever sewn a stitch before, unless you count hemming a lapa, the wraparound skirts Liberian women wear daily.

But Ms. Bernard, 27, a Georgia Tech graduate who moved back to her parents’ native Liberia in 2011 after deciding that postwar Liberia may be an easier place to find a job than the post-recession United States, is determined to change all of that.

It’s a difficult task, because Ms. Bernard is using indigenous fabrics with their gorgeous hues of big, bold primary colors for her designs, and she is not adhering to the traditional West African gowns and lapas for her styles. Instead of the modest two-piece lapa and fitted shirts that Liberian women wear, Bombchel pieces are haltered, braless tops. (In Liberian-English, the description is “dig my back” or “admire how nice my exposed backside looks with no bra.”) There are blouses with one side artfully cut out, the better, of course, to expose a shoulder.

As for the demure body-covering long tunics with pants underneath that are de rigueur across West Africa? Forget it. Bombchel offers a “resort” pant with slits up each side that go to the top of the thigh.

Let’s just say that when you sit, it’s nothing but leg. For days.

In a country where entering a government office building without covering your arms causes eyebrows to arch, Bombchel designs are on just this side of edgy. But while Ms. Bernard initially thought her pieces would appeal only to expats and “been-to” Liberians (local parlance for Liberians who have “been to” the United States and are more adventurous in their clothing), she quickly found that an array of Liberian women were ready to show a little more skin.

The whole thing started when Ms. Bernard first arrived in Liberia and joined the rest of the population taking fabric to local tailors to make outfits, which is how many Liberians fill their wardrobes. Because traditional African clothes “aren’t typically to my taste,” Ms. Bernard said, she drew her own designs for what she thought would look good on her: She is both petite and buxom, a striking combination in the right clothes.

She sketched a dress design she thought would look good and took it to a local tailor. When she went to pick up the dress, she found the tailor wearing a copy. Another customer was also wearing a freshly purchased copy, and another tailor was in the corner sewing up a bunch more of Ms. Bernard’s design to sell on racks.

Outraged but also intrigued, Ms. Bernard, not even realizing it, began the first steps toward creating her own business. She had never really designed clothing before moving to Liberia, but the frenetic market and street scenes here in the capital, with the women navigating the chaos in their bright lapas and beautiful Fanti cloth, suddenly inspired her. “I was thrilled by the design possibilities, because from where I sat, we could do much more than tie lapa round our waist,” she said, slipping into Liberian English.

Ms. Bernard opened a small boutique called Mango Rags in 2013 in a downtown compound owned by her family. By the next year she had received two large magazine spreads.

The arrival of Ebola in 2014 upended businesses across Liberia, and Mango Rags was no different. No one wanted high fashion when they were worried about what suddenly felt like the apocalypse. Ms. Bernard closed her shop and fled to the United States.

She stayed away for five months. On Jan. 1, 2015, she bought a return ticket to Liberia. “Ebola or no Ebola, I was ready to come back home,” she said.

Home again, only to meet a country picking itself up from the worst pandemic in its history. Post-Ebola Liberia was now filled with people who, even though they had managed to beat the virus, were like the walking wounded. Because Ebola can be spread through direct contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids, survivors were often stigmatized. And because of how Ebola is transmitted, survivors often lost the people closest to them.

Ms. Kamara, the Bombchel worker who asked her uncle to help find Ms. Bernard’s iPhone, lost her 8-month-old boy to the disease. Beatrice Blama, 27, another factory worker and Ebola survivor, lost her husband. Bettina Yain, 26, lost a close friend.

Last month, all three women were busy at the new factory hoping for a chance to stitch their lives back together. Ms. Bernard’s official factory was opening, complete with a Kickstarter campaign to start Feb. 1 to raise $35,000 to help fund the business, and her workers had to get ready.

Sitting before her new sewing machine, Ms. Yain said: “When I came from the hospital, nobody wanted to come close to me. I used to be lonely.” She had to move from her old neighborhood, she said, to a new part of the city, “where people don’t know I’m a survivor.”

As she talked, a man walked into the factory, grinning, brandishing something in his hand. Ms. Bernard leapt up. “You found my phone!” she yelled. The ensuing commotion seemed to cheer up Ms. Yain. She wasn’t talking about being alone anymore. Now she was talking about a dig-my-back dress.

“I like that dress there,” she said, pointing. It was a typical Bombchel piece, demure-ish flare skirt on the bottom, party (bra-lelujah liberation) on top. It would take a bold and confident woman to pull that off, definitely not someone who was trying to stay incognito.

Ms. Yain was grinning now. “These clothes,” she said, “for true, they fine, oh.”