SMALL-TOWN DESIGNERS
Rooted in small-town values and affecting an old-world charm, a crop of new designers is digging deep into history and nostalgia to make a style statement
They weave history and nostalgia to make unique style statements
INthe narrow lanes of Saharanpur, a small town in western Uttar Pradesh, about 200 km from the national capital, Mohammed Mazhar looks for inspiration for his next collection in the traditional embroidery work of the kadhaaiwalas (embroiders). The 29-year-old, who has shown his work twice at the Lakme Fashion Week and was named one of the finest GenNext fashion designers, is content to work from Saharanpur and not move to a bustling big city. Mazhar justifies his choice by saying he finds his narratives and context here, he resists accepted notions of a high-profile career, and, above all, has the courage to put this small town on the fashion map of the country.
It all started when as a class nine student, Mazhar set up a boutique with his senior in school. The senior’s father had a boutique.
In 2017, Mazhar’s first collection, called Dhobi Ghat, evoked nostalgia about his hometown. The washerwoman Sakina Begum, a regular visitor at his home, used to make a small mark on the clothes. The whites of his collection had these marks that Sakina, along with 30 other women, pressed on to the clothes to make a design. The next collection used darn or the craft of the rafugars.
“My inspiration is the Indian artisan, especially those indirectly contributing to the fashion industry like the dhobi or the rafugar,” he says.
Saharanpur is known for wooden handicraft and Mazhar’s family is one of the many engaged in this business. “Coming from a conservative Muslim family, it wasn’t easy to say that I wanted to be a designer,” he adds.
Today, he runs his label under the national rural employment guarantee programme and more than 70 people work for him. In his design, the visual language is distinctly made up of small-town life and the ways of the artisans there.
Rahul Mishra invokes his village, Malhausi, in his collections on display at the Paris Fashion Week. Just like Mazhar, nostalgia is the primary moving force in his designs too. The broken door, where his mother used to hang a white curtain with its daraz work filtering the afternoon sunlight symbolising a diffused state of being with those white curtains shielding him against the world. His intimate relationship with the things of his childhood—pillow cases, curtains, table cloth, the white of his grandmother’s dhoti, the little pond, dew
“Today, fashion is everywhere and is no longer limited to the metros” Sreejith Jeevan
drops and the white and blue checks of the lungis of the weavers and the butchers in his sleepy village in UP— are all part of his storytelling as a designer. While India’s fashion story is shaped by designers who come from little towns and villages and set up shops in Delhi and Mumbai like Samant Chauhan, who is from a small place near Jamalpur in Bihar, or Sanjay Garg of Raw Mango, who hails from Mubarikpur, there is also another set of designers who are choosing to live and work in their small towns and reaching out to the world with their crafts via social media and e-commerce. Like in Kochi, Kerala, 32-year-old Sreejith Jeevan says he is moving towards “unfashioning” and it is the joy of slow-paced life that inspires his designs and collections. “We’re moving so fast that sometimes we have absolutely no time for little things such as raindrops and birds.
“We have been able to employ 30 women from the surrounding villages” Praveen Chauhan
Though being far from the fashion capital of the country comes with its own drawbacks, there is nothing like the feeling of being home, doing the work you love in a place you know. “Today, fashion is everywhere and is no longer limited to the metros,” says Jeevan, who studied at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), Paris. He launched his label Rouka in 2013. “My stories have a local flavour for a global audience,” he says.
After the devastating floods in Kerala this year, Jeevan, along with some other designers, helped the weavers of Chendamangalam, near Kochi in Kerala, who had lost their livelihood, get on their feet with the launch of Origins.
“How can my people make fashion for the world—that’s what I ask myself,” he says.
With sustainable fashion and craft becoming the buzzwords of the industry, it is no surprise that designers are looking back at their experiences and creating a new design vocabulary, along with social consciousness and an urgency to be innovative with local crafts and contexts. Take, for instance, Biharbased social entrepreneur and designer Praveen Chauhan, who set up MATR-Motherly. Luxury. Artistry, a social enterprise in Bodh Gaya, his native place. The National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) alumnus collects discarded flowers from the Mahabodhi Temple and transforms them into natural dyes with Kathy Williams, who is from Australia and the founder of ‘Because of Nature’, a sustainable clothing label. Together, they have founded the Happy Hands Project. “I always tell artisans that it is your right to expect from us. You are the people who kept our art, craft and culture alive. The artisans have taken me to a different level of creativity. So many people from other countries approach me to study traditional Indian textile and handicrafts,” he says.
“Thousands of people visit the Mahabodhi Temple every day and offer hundreds of kilograms of flowers. Though this project is at its early stage, we have been able to employ 30 women from the surrounding villages,” he says.
The Happy Hands Project is an initiative started as a collabora-
“Living in a small city, closer to the tribals, I see the importance of local traditions at the global level” Pankaja Sethi
“Living in a rural area has enabled us to work from farm to fashion, which would have been impossible in a big city ” Vijayalakshmi Nachiar
tion between the Bodhgaya temple management committee, MATR and Because of Nature to bring sustainable employment to the people through natural dyes on khadi made in Bihar. The project aims to promote the skills of artisans to produce high quality khadi and garments for national and international designers and retail brands that utilise traditional skills.
People used to make fun of him, saying that he was studying tailoring at a high cost after joining NIFT. His father, a contractor, supported him against all odds. Today, Chauhan is credited with reviving khadi, along with other ventures.
Forty-eight-year-old Vijayalakshmi Nachiar grew up in a ‘Kutchi’ family and was introduced to the world of embroidery and textiles at a young age: Her family had been cotton traders for generations. She graduated in textiles and clothing from the SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai.
After marriage, she moved to Pollachi on the outskirts of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, an agrarian town with a rich tradition of woven cotton sarees.
Her husband started growing ecological cotton through his contract farming initiatives in 2005. And, in 2008, Nachiar set up a handloom studio and co-founded Ethicus in 2009.
“I think I can do what I am doing today with Ethicus only because I come from a small town. This would have been impossible in a big city. I have an in-house production facility and local craftsmen work here. Living in a rural area has enabled us to work from farm to fashion,” says Nachiar.
When they launched Ethicus, there were very few handloom brands and the challenges were many. “Customers were willing to pay high price for silk but not for good cotton,” she says.
Today, her venture is listed by the textile exchange as one of the few brands worldwide using 100 per cent sustainable raw material and adopting a sustainable method of production. It has been awarded the ‘Future Shaper’ prize by textiles exchange in 2012 and the ‘Pride of Tamil Nadu’ award in 2017, instituted by the Round Table of India, as an emerging retail brand.
Naushad Ali’s story is similar. “My dad was a textile merchant and I grew up with all kinds of fabric around me. We used to have bundles of fabric from all over India stocked up in our living room, and I used to help my father tag them all. That was my introduction to textiles and fashion,” says Ali, 33. Unsure of being accepted as a designer, Ali gave himself five years when he launched his label at Puducherry. “The lifestyle, landscape, culture and people I meet every day have all been great inspirations for the label and shaped me as a designer. ‘Made in Pondicherry’ has given me an identity in the industry,” he adds.
“We are committed to being a sustainable label, with a difference. Being part of fashion, the second most polluting industry in the world, I want to
“We are committed to being a sustainable label. I believe in slow fashion, creating things that last” Naushad Ali
take my decisions carefully and consciously— from the choice of materials to what we make out of them. I believe in slow fashion, creating something that lasts and is also something meaningful,” he says.
Born in Vellore, Ali spent his growing up years in Chennai and Bengaluru, before his parents moved to Puducherry. He wanted to be an astrophysicist and was also good at botanical drawings. But once he got through NIFT, Chennai, he knew he would do something entirely different.
In 2014, he set up Studio Liam in Auroville to revisit and transfer the expertise of Indian craftsmen to contemporary fashion. His definition of fashion: there is no hurry, there are no seasons, there’s only time and commitment. In 2017, three years after he launched his label, he received the prestigious Grazia Young Fashion Award (Sustainable Wear category). And in 2018, he was chosen to represent India for the first IFS biennale at London Fashion Week, 2019, supported by the London College of Fashion and Somerset House.
Pankaja Sethi, 39, spent her childhood at different places—from Itanagar to Chennai— as her father was the chief medical officer with the CRPF. A graduate in botanical science and a NIFT alumnus, after working for export houses, she was asked by a former teacher to help document the folk arts and narratives of Jharkhand. That was the beginning of her foray into indigenous textiles. She relocated to Odisha to help with design intervention and work with tribal weavers.
It was not an easy task to enrol artisans to create textiles because some of them had fallen in the trap of mass production and many of them did not want to create contemporary concepts, fearing it wouldn’t last, she adds.
“Being located in Bhubaneswar, I now see the merits of living in a place that is pollutionfree and with much less traffic on the roads compared to metro cities. Moreover, I am close to the weavers and the tribals, who create indigenous textiles and crafts. And, above all, I see the importance of local traditions at the global level,” she says.