This Modest Fashion Site is Taking Over: 10 Minutes with The Reflective’s Liza Sakhaie

Whether you’ve been dressing modestly your whole life, or it’s something you’ve chosen to do later on, figuring out how to feel like “you” in your clothes can be challenging. I’m sure so many of us could use a bit more simcha (joy) in the mitzvah of dressing b’tzniut (modestly).

Instead of choosing an outfit out of habit and halacha (Jewish law), you want to do it with love and excitement. Clothing doesn’t just have to cover your body—it can and should be an expression of who that soul is on the inside. But with so much else going on, it’s hard to allot time “just” to your wardrobe. Enter The Reflective.

Founder Liza Sakhaie and a few friends started this modest fashion newsletter and website out of a desire to help other women find fun and love in dressing b’tzniut. They curate pieces from affordable vendors and put them together in outfits or categories to help you shop with style and ease. They also feature up-and-coming designers with lots of modest options you may not have heard about. Instead of spending hours trying to sort through thousands of ASOS selections, you can let them do the work for you (they already did!).

We sat down with the brand’s founder, Liza Sakhaie, to get the scoop on The Reflective’s beginnings, its goals and how it can help you find a new love for tzniut dressing. Then, stay tuned for some life-changing style tips later this week!

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Let’s start at the beginning. When did you set up The Reflective and what inspired you to do so?

We started in August 2020 with Instagram posts to get people excited, and then our newsletter launched in October. I grew up in a traditional home but was never observant. I became more religious in college and had already been working in fashion for six years at that point. When I started dressing modestly, it was so difficult. Either I was spending an insane amount of money to look good and feel comfortable in my clothes, or I was spending hours filtering [through options] on secular sites. I just thought to myself, “This is not normal.” I felt like it didn’t need to be that difficult.

Then people started asking me to help style them or take them shopping, and I thought there must be a way to do this on a bigger scale. There are probably many people out there who feel the way I do, or don’t even know they feel that way, because they’ve always been wearing a black skirt and sweater. They might not know what it means to have their own personal style. The Jewish meaning behind tzniut includes a lot that’s supposed to be internal and a reflection of who you are. I think people are missing out on a lot of the mitzvah by not being able to properly express themselves through their clothing. I really wanted to do something about that.

I was working at Bloomingdale’s most recently, developing pop-up shops. It was fun but I really felt like it was lacking meaning. Once COVID hit, I was furloughed, and it was the perfect time to start this. I reached out to some friends and now we have a team of five women.

What is the main goal of the site?

Our long-term goal is to be an e-commerce website for the modest woman but, for now, we’re trying to be a resource for all the things we felt were lacking in this area. We felt like we were missing ease, resources, styling and community, so we set out to provide that. We really want to have this platform serve as a space for women who dress modestly across all spectrums—Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Maybe someone dresses modestly for different occasions or when it matters more to her. Often, people are afraid to define themselves as “modest” if they feel like they’re not fully there. We’re trying to get rid of that stigma. Even if once a week you’re dressing more modestly, you’re still on that journey, so we’re trying to highlight the process and not only the end result.

Where does The Reflective’s name come from?

We were thinking through keywords associated with modesty and really wanted to steer away from any negative stigma modesty could have. We thought about what modesty really meant to us, which is the idea that your clothes are a reflection of who you are internally. So, The Reflective is just a play on reflecting who you really are. 

It’s a beautiful idea and name. It can be hard to find balance between putting an emphasis on gashmiut (physicality) and physical appearance and then shopping and getting dressed, with a connection to Hashem. How do keep all those ideas balanced while bringing a true connection to the mitzvah?

It was definitely difficult at first, but the more I found out that other women were able to take on the mitzvah of dressing b’tzniut because they saw me doing it in a certain way, it became more about being a kiddush Hashem (sanctifying G-d’s Name) and showing other women that this is an accessible mitzvah. It’s not meant to be painful or difficult. That’s really how I found meaning in it for myself. 

I always think back to a class I had with Mrs. Avigail Gersht at Neve* in Jerusalem. She spoke about how the word tzniut is defined in so many ways because the Hebrew word doesn’t have such a proper English translation. But the way she described it was about internality. A lot of the time, people put such a focus on discussing your externality and put so little focus on what they’re wearing that everyone kind of dresses the same way. She was saying that in some places every girl is wearing a button-down and black skirt, and if that’s your thing, then go for it, that’s beautiful. But if you’re defining your modesty and dress by the way someone else dresses, that immediately makes it external and you’ve lost the essence of the mitzvah. It’s about understanding yourself and choosing to elevate the physical with something spiritual. How are you using your clothes? The constant goal of so much in Judaism is to find that balance.

“It’s about understanding yourself and choosing to elevate the physical with something spiritual.”

I love that, it’s really so empowering and immediately brings a new outlook and light to getting dressed. Where do you find your fashion inspiration from?

There’s an amazing Instagrammer named @toibycontinued. She makes hilarious TikToks, where she takes influencers’ outfits that are really cool but aren’t modest and turns them into skirt outfits. She shows you how you can keep up with the trend and emulate someone else’s style but make it modest. She’s so creative. So, I get a lot of inspiration from her on how to take fashion from secular sources like Vogue and transform them into something that fits my value system.

So cool, I’m excited to check her out. It’s also hard not to touch on the pandemic. With the way the world has changed, how do you feel fashion has shifted and how has it affected your brand?

Overall, I think people are realizing they don’t need that much. Before, there were six different seasons—spring, summer, fall and winter and pre-fall and resort—so stores would turn over their inventory every two months. When the pandemic hit, stores didn’t open and there was all this stuff just sitting on the shelves and then when things did reopen, there were all new shipments coming in. It was a wake-up call for the entire industry that maybe they’re just pushing too much product and it’s unnecessary. 

On social media, I’m also seeing a lot of conversation about conscious shopping—not just about sustainability but about overconsumption. A lot of people are talking about capsule collections, or having a few key pieces in your wardrobe that you can re-wear with a ton of different outfits rather than buying a bunch of trendy pieces. 

With our brand, it’s definitely challenging. Our whole essence revolves around getting dressed and shopping and most people aren’t doing either of those things so much. But I think it’s forced us in the best way possible to really build out this community aspect, and we’re sharing more about the meaning of modesty. Even though we’re all Jewish, we don’t want there to be an exclusivity to it, so we feature community members of different faiths. That’s become a big part of the platform, which I never expected. 

For more from The Reflective, follow them on Instagram, sign up for their newsletter and visit their site.

_{*Neve is an orthodox women’s seminary in Israel for baalei teshuvah.}