Our Story
AURAQ began in 2015 with a single embroidery frame in a Gulberg courtyard. Today our atelier is home to more than two hundred karigars, and every piece still passes through their hands.
اوراق
We chose the name because every collection is a page in a much longer story: the story of Lahore’s craft, passed from ustad to apprentice for five centuries, and of the women who wear it to weddings, Eid lunches and ordinary Tuesdays. We just try to write each page well.
A Note from Our Founder
I grew up in my nani’s house in Model Town, where every wedding season began the same way: bolts of silk spread across the floor, a karigar sitting cross-legged on the veranda, and weeks of quiet, careful work before anyone wore a thing. I didn’t know it then, but I was watching the most patient art form I would ever encounter.
When I started AURAQ in 2015, it was with one master karigar, Ustad Bashir Ahmed, and one wooden adda. We made twelve pieces that first season. They took far longer than any business plan allowed, and every one of them sold to a woman who wrote back to tell us where she had worn it.
We are much bigger now, but the principle hasn’t changed. Our designs are drawn around what our karigars do best, not the other way round. We buy fabric we would wear ourselves, we cut for real bodies, and we pay the people who make our clothes properly, every month, whether the season is busy or slow.
Thank you for wearing our pages. We hope they become part of yours.
Alizeh Rashid
Founder & Creative Director
The Lahore Atelier
Our atelier sits above the flagship on MM Alam Road. On the first floor, pattern cutters and tailors work beside the fabric store; on the second, beneath a row of tall windows, eleven wooden addas hold lengths of silk stretched taut as drums.
Our master karigars work here. The rest of our artisans work in three smaller workshops in the walled city, Shahdara and Kasur, close to home and held to exactly the same standards. Many come from families who have embroidered for generations. All are salaried, insured and credited by name on every Signature piece, and twelve apprentices at a time train beside them on our two-year programme.
The Craft
Five techniques, each with centuries behind it, and each still worked entirely by hand in our atelier. This is what to look for in an AURAQ piece.
Once reserved for the Mughal court, zardozi is metal-thread embroidery at its most sculptural. Coils of gold and silver wire (dabka, naqshi, kora and salma) are cut, threaded and couched onto silk by hand, building raised motifs that catch the light from every angle.
Fine metallic thread laid flat across the surface and anchored with tiny, almost invisible stitches. Where zardozi is sculpted, tilla is liquid: a soft, continuous shimmer that adds almost no weight, which is why we choose it for organza and chiffon.
Woven ribbons of gold or silver, folded, cut and hand-applied into borders, florals and geometric jaals. Gota has dressed Punjabi brides for centuries, and nothing moves quite like it: a gota hem glints with every step.
Silk-floss embroidery worked in satin and long-and-short stitch, so finely shaded that our florals look painted. We dye resham in small lots each season to match the palette exactly, sometimes using forty shades on a single shirt.
Also called badla or fardi work: slim strips of flattened metal are threaded through the cloth, twisted and pressed by hand into tiny glinting dots. A single mukesh dupatta can carry several thousand of them, scattered like stars on a night sky.
By the Numbers
What We Stand For
Handwork is never an afterthought. Every collection begins at the embroidery frame, and our designers draw around what our karigars do best.
Fine-count lawn, raw silk with a true slub, organza you can see light through. The full composition of every piece is listed on its product page.
Patterns are graded from XS to XL on fit models and tested in motion: sitting, walking, dancing at a mehndi. Alterations are complimentary in our boutiques.
Fixed monthly wages and health cover for every artisan, offcuts reworked into potlis and piping, and muslin and recycled-paper packaging.
The Process
Weeks 1–3
Every collection starts as pencil on paper, with motifs drawn from carved jaali screens, old Lahore havelis and the Shalimar gardens. The final design is traced onto butter paper and pricked by hand for transfer.
Weeks 3–5
Base cloths are sampled, washed and tested for drape, shrinkage and colour-fastness before a metre is cut. Each shade is then dyed in small lots and matched to the swatch by eye, in daylight.
Up to 120 hours
The fabric is stretched on the adda and our karigars begin, in zardozi, tilla, gota, resham or mukesh. A single Signature shirt can take five weeks and pass through four pairs of hands.
The final 48 hours
Panels are steamed from the back, stitched and pressed, then checked under daylight lamps with every thread trimmed and every border measured. Each piece is wrapped in muslin with a handwritten care card.
Wear the Story
Discover the collections our atelier is working on now, or visit a boutique to see the handwork up close.