What I wanted to do was create a space where you come into my shop and you feel like you’re on holiday,” says Dhisha Moorjani. Her boutique — Dhisha Moorjani Designs — brings Caribbean aesthetics to Cologne, Germany. Customers have said, “I feel like it’s always summer here.”
Moorjani explains, “I decided if I am going to make a mark here, I have to do it with colour.”
Moorjani was raised in a vibrant world. Born in Trinidad to parents who migrated from India in the 1960s, she grew up at the cultural nexus of her Caribbean home and ancestral heritage. “This mix of two cultures, it shaped my destiny.”
There’s also friction that comes from straddling worlds. Her parents were strict; partying and boyfriends were forbidden. They believed in arranged marriages — their union had been arranged — and young Dhisha wondered why her life was so different from her peers’.
Was this a recipe for familial estrangement? Quite the opposite. “That’s where all my inspiration came from — it was my mom,” Moorjani says. Her mother had no passport before migrating; she spoke no English. Yet that didn’t stop her from opening a small business in Trinidad. “She was such an ambitious woman. She opened a beauty parlour in her home. She didn’t know how to do much, but she knew about some ancient Indian methods of beauty and she shared that with her clients.” At nineteen, Moorjani started working as a customer service agent at the airline BWIA. “It was the most adventurous thing I could have done.” Her parents were concerned initially ....
