MAJA KOTALA
Fashion designer, educator and founder working between creativity, culture and community in Africa
Maja Kotala is a Polish fashion designer, educator and founder whose work sits at the intersection of fashion, education, sustainability, storytelling and social change.
Originally from Chorzów, Poland, Maja has spent much of her adult life moving between cultures. She studied fashion design in Sydney, built her early career in the international fashion industry, working across Paris, Milan, New York and Pitti Uomo, and eventually found the place she now calls home in Mombasa, Kenya.
Today, her work is rooted in Africa — not as a distant subject of fascination, but as a place she has chosen to live, work and learn.
BEFORE FASHION
Her story began long before Sewing Together.
Growing up in Poland, Maja was surrounded by sport, movement and a strong belief that life could be built differently. She sailed, skied and played volleyball from an early age. A skiing accident eventually changed the direction of her life and introduced her to modelling.
What initially seemed like a detour became an entry point into the world of fashion.
At eighteen, Maja left Poland for Australia.
She moved to Sydney with little certainty about where the journey would take her, but with a strong desire to experience a life beyond the one she had known.
Her English was limited. She had no established career in fashion and no clear roadmap for what would come next.
But she had determination.
She applied to fashion school in Sydney and was accepted without having to sit an entrance exam. Her portfolio, by her own admission, was far from perfect.
The person who saw something beyond the portfolio was Nicholas Huxley, the school's director.
Years later, Maja still remembers that moment.
“My portfolio was tragic, but I think he saw something in me. He believed in me and changed my life.”
That decision became one of the defining turning points in her life.
Maja entered fashion school with limited English but an enormous willingness to learn. She worked hard, finished her studies and began developing her own creative language.
For her, fashion quickly became about much more than clothing.
She became fascinated by the entire process behind a garment — design, construction, materials, styling, communication, business and, increasingly, the stories that fashion can tell.
During this period, she also started developing her own fashion brand.
It was an exciting time, but it was not easy. Building a fashion business required resources she did not have, and eventually financial reality forced her to put the brand on hold.
But once again, a setback became a change of direction rather than an ending.
PARIS
Maja moved to Paris.
For several years, she worked within the international fashion industry, building experience across different sides of the business. Her work took her between Paris, Milan, New York and Pitti Uomo, exposing her to different markets, brands and approaches to fashion.
She experienced the industry from many perspectives — as a model, designer, stylist, salesperson and brand representative.
Paris gave her a completely different understanding of fashion.
She saw its glamour, but also its commercial machinery. She learned how brands position themselves, how products are sold, how relationships are built and how an idea becomes a business.
She travelled extensively and met people from different cultures and industries.
The more she saw, the more her understanding of fashion expanded.
But eventually, something was missing.
Maja began to question not only what she wanted to do next, but what kind of legacy she wanted to leave behind.
She had accumulated skills.
She knew fashion.
She knew how to create.
She knew how to sell.
She knew how brands communicated.
She understood the business behind creativity.
And she began asking herself a different question:
What could I do with everything I have learned if I took it somewhere else?
Somewhere where those skills could have a different meaning.
Africa had already begun to occupy a growing place in her imagination. But Maja was not interested in Africa simply as a destination. She wanted to understand it beyond the images commonly presented through tourism, international media and charity campaigns. She was fascinated by the creativity, colour, cultures, people, contradictions and everyday stories she encountered. She wanted to see what existed beyond the familiar narrative of an Africa that needed to be rescued. She did not want simply to visit.
She wanted to participate.
THE BEGINNING OF SEWING TOGETHER
In 2018, Maja created Sewing Together, an educational programme built around a simple idea: practical skills can create independence.
But the idea, as it exists today, was not fully formed when she started.
The first project took her to Uganda, where she worked with Kimuli Fashionability on sustainable fashion and experimented with turning discarded sugar and cement bags into new products.
Maja arrived with enthusiasm, fashion experience and what she believed was a good plan.
Looking back, she describes herself with uncomfortable honesty:
“I went to Uganda as a typical white saviour, with a master plan in hand.”
At the time, she did not think she was doing anything wrong.
She genuinely wanted to help. She believed that her fashion knowledge, combined with a practical project, could create opportunities for people. She had prepared, planned and imagined how the project would work.
But Africa did not follow her plan.
The reality on the ground was more complicated than anything she had anticipated. The needs of the people she was working with, the local context, the available resources and the assumptions she had arrived with did not always align.
What looked logical from Europe did not necessarily make sense in Uganda.
The experience was uncomfortable.
And important.
Instead of leaving Africa convinced that her idea had failed, Maja began questioning something much deeper: perhaps it was not Africa that needed to adapt to her idea. Perhaps she needed to adapt the idea to the reality around her.
She returned to Paris ready to give up.
For a moment, Sewing Together could have ended there.
But the experience stayed with her.
It forced Maja to reconsider what it actually means to help, to teach and to work with communities in another country.
She began to understand that arriving with answers was not the same as creating an opportunity.
That education had to be a two-way process.
That local knowledge mattered as much as her own expertise.
And that if she wanted Sewing Together to have a lasting impact, it could not be built around the idea of Maja coming in to save anyone.
It had to be built around partnership, skills and independence.
Rather than arriving with answers, she began learning to listen.
That became one of the foundations of Sewing Together.
FROM UGANDA TO NAIROBI
A year later, Sewing Together went to Nairobi.
Maja began working with the Salvation Army, training women in fashion and sewing skills.
This time, she approached the work differently.
The programme was becoming much more than teaching someone how to operate a sewing machine.
Maja wanted women to understand the entire process behind creating a fashion product and, potentially, building a business around it.
They learned drawing and design, pattern making and sewing, but also photography, marketing, pricing, finance and entrepreneurship.
Because knowing how to sew is one skill.
Knowing how to turn that skill into an independent livelihood is another.
The philosophy became simple:
not giving someone a fish, but giving them the tools to create their own livelihood.
This idea would remain at the heart of Sewing Together.
MOMBASA
In 2020, Mombasa became the centre of the story.
After the difficult months of the pandemic, Maja opened a temporary training space in Nyali. What was initially another chapter in the Sewing Together journey gradually became something much bigger.
In 2021, Sewing Together established a permanent creative and educational space in Bamburi and began working with organisations including HAART Kenya.
But something else was happening at the same time.
Maja was no longer simply running a project in Kenya.
She was building a life there.
Mombasa gradually became more than the location of Sewing Together.
It became home.
MAMMA AFRICA
There is something about Mamma Africa that changed Maja's relationship with the continent.
The Indian Ocean, Swahili culture, Islamic heritage, colourful streets, local craftsmanship, music, food, architecture, fabrics and the rhythm of everyday life became part of her creative vocabulary.
After years of moving between countries and fashion capitals, Maja found herself drawn to a completely different kind of creative environment.
Here, fashion was not separated from everyday life.
Clothing carries culture, religion, identity, practicality, climate and history. Fabrics tell stories. Colours communicate. The way people dress can reveal where they come from, what they believe, what they value and how they see themselves. Living in Mombasa changed the way Maja looked at fashion.
She became increasingly interested in the space between global fashion and local creativity — and in what happens when those worlds meet on equal terms. Her fascination with Africa is not limited to its visual beauty. She is fascinated by its people, creativity, cultures, colours, contradictions and everyday stories.
And the longer she lived here, the more uncomfortable she became with the simplified narratives she had once encountered — narratives that often reduced Africa to poverty, charity or the idea of a continent waiting to be rescued.
Maja wanted to tell a different story.
Not a romanticised story. Not a story that pretends inequality does not exist.
But a more complete one. A story about people who create, build, struggle, succeed, fail, invent, dream and run businesses. About designers, makers, artists, entrepreneurs, mothers, students and young people creating their own futures. For Maja, Africa does not need to be presented as a place waiting to be saved.
It is a place full of talent, ideas, creativity and possibility.
SEWING TOGETHER — BEYOND SEWING
Over the years, Sewing Together expanded through partnerships in East Africa.
Projects took place in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Madagascar, with collaborations designed to adapt the programme to local communities rather than impose one universal model.
The philosophy remained consistent: education, practical skills, creativity and economic independence.
Sewing Together also became a laboratory for sustainable fashion.
Maja and the women she worked with experimented with discarded materials — from bedsheets and curtains to sacks and other materials that could be transformed rather than thrown away.
Upcycling was not treated simply as an aesthetic trend.
It became a practical way of asking a bigger question:
What already exists, and what can we create from it?
This approach eventually became part of Maja's own fashion practice.
Her collections combine African fabrics, second-hand and discarded materials, local references and contemporary silhouettes. Pieces are often one-of-a-kind because the material itself determines part of the design.
The result is fashion that carries a story before it is even worn.
FASHION AS A LANGUAGE
For Maja, fashion has never been only about clothes. It is a language. It can communicate identity, culture, humour, history, resistance, femininity and belonging.
It can also create economic opportunity. That is why her work moves freely between designing collections, teaching sewing, creating campaigns, working with makers, organising workshops and telling stories.
She sees no strict division between fashion and education, or between creativity and social impact.
They are part of the same ecosystem. Her approach is also deliberately independent.
Rather than building projects around dependency, she looks for ways in which skills, production, collaborations and sales can contribute to long-term opportunities.
The goal is not to create beneficiaries. It is to create makers, entrepreneurs, collaborators and people capable of building something of their own.
WOMEN'S HEALTH AND THE VICTORIA RALLY
Another important chapter of Maja's work began with something unexpectedly personal: a period, a missing sanitary product and a pair of socks.
Maja had been travelling between East African countries when one ordinary moment made her stop and think.
“I remember coming back to Mombasa from Tanzania when I got my period. I didn't have anything to protect myself with — only my sock. And then I realised: if I, as someone who can normally go to a shop and buy sanitary products, found myself in that situation, what happens to women and girls who don't have that option?”
The question stayed with her.
She began thinking about what happens during a menstrual emergency when sanitary products are unavailable or unaffordable. And, more importantly, what happens to women and girls who regularly face that situation.
For Maja, the connection to sewing was immediate.
She already knew that sewing could be a tool for independence. She had spent years teaching women how to turn fabric and practical skills into opportunities.
Why not apply the same idea to menstrual health?
Instead of simply distributing sanitary products, women could learn how to make reusable ones themselves.
And if they could make them themselves, they could potentially make them for others.
What began with a personal experience gradually developed into a much larger project.
THE VICTORIA RALLY
This became the Victoria Rally — a women-led African road expedition combining travel, education, sewing and women's health.
The concept was simple but ambitious: travel across African countries, meet local communities and organise practical workshops where women learn how to make reusable menstrual pads while also taking part in menstrual health education.
The workshops are designed to leave something behind.
Participants do not simply receive a product.
They learn how to make it themselves.
The sewing machine becomes more than a tool for producing a menstrual pad. It becomes a way of transferring knowledge and creating a skill that can continue to be used long after the rally has moved on.
Over the years, Victoria Rally projects have taken place across countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique and Ethiopia.
The teams have worked with women and girls in very different environments — from communities and schools to more unexpected settings, including prisons — adapting the workshops to the realities of each place.
The projects have also helped establish small sewing spaces where local women can continue producing reusable menstrual products after the travelling team has left.
For Maja, this is another expression of the same principle that lies behind Sewing Together:
knowledge should travel further than the person who teaches it.
The Victoria Rally also changed something else. It transformed the journey itself into part of the work.
The road became a classroom. The car became a mobile base. And the distance between countries became an opportunity to connect people, exchange knowledge and challenge assumptions.
What started with a sock became a project that connected Maja's two worlds: her love of travel and Africa, and the belief that practical skills can give people greater independence.
The Victoria Rally was never only about making menstrual pads.
It was about asking what happens when a woman is given not just a product, but the knowledge and tools to make one herself.
10 THINGS YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT MAJA
-
Africa gave her a freedom Europe couldn't. It gave her space to truly discover who she is.
-
She secretly thinks the pandemic was one of the best things that happened to her. Starting from zero in Kenya pushed her online — and opened connections across the world.
-
She became Muslim in 2012. Her faith has been an important part of her personal journey ever since.
-
She has been robbed and attacked more than once. Somehow, it still hasn't stopped her believing in people.
-
She goes to therapy. Hearing and carrying the stories of so many women has taught her that she can't carry everything alone.
-
She has worked with people she once considered her heroes — including Martyna Wojciechowska, Gosia Baczyńska and Jakub Bączyński. She believes the right people eventually meet — so never give up on your heroes.
-
She dreams of winning a Nobel Prize. For fighting menstrual poverty in Africa, of course. ;)
-
Her greatest strength is determination and optimism — which can also make her naive. She's now working on building stronger “buttocks” for a less painful landing.
-
She's a self-taught photographer. All the photos on her social media are actually taken by her.
-
She believes changing one person's life can change an entire generation. And she genuinely believes she can make the world a little better — so she keeps trying.