The fashion industry isn’t generally concerned with social justice or making the world a better place. Just making it prettier. But new label Maiyet aims to do both.

Maiyet, which is named for the Egyptian goddess of truth and harmony, is the brainchild of South African human rights lawyer Paul van Zyl and industry vet Kristy Caylor (she was most recently the president of Band of Outsiders). “Part of this idea was to try to find a way of restoring prosperity to communities which had been through hard times,” van Zyl said. “So the idea was to find artisans who have this very rare skill and to elevate that into something beautiful and to allow them to derive greater value from their craft and to return the prosperity to them.”

What that means is that Maiyet partners with artisans in communities in India, Colombia, Kenya and Indonesia (to name a few countries) and works their craft into design elements of the line. “We take their skill set and do the design work ourselves and harness that skill set into their looks,” Caylor said. Maiyet then works with these artisans to develop their crafts over time and bring value back to the community–no plundering here. To find these artisans, Caylor and van Zyl took 25 international trips over six months. “We scoured the earth from places we both wanted to work with from a social perspective but also from a product perspective,” Caylor said.

And the end product?

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