The Traditional Touch

Woven wonders from across the country met textile giants and celebratory fashion on Sustainable Fashion and Indian Textiles Day at Lakme Fashion Week Winter/festive 2016

EVERY SEASON, on Sustainable Fashion and Indian Textiles Day at Lakme Fashion Week (LFW), the pace perceptibly changes. Fashion editors sport handloom saris and tie-dye kurtas and bloggers pair their Adidas Originals with linen culottes and block-print crop tops. But more than just a visible cosmetic shift in the look of the proverbial fashion week watcher, the narrative veers away from our couture cognoscenti and their escalating entourages and egos. Starring role credits are grabbed by home-grown textile heroes and their artisanal weaves are celebrated. And while some may argue that the day-long exercise only elicits a superficial, maybe subliminal, exchange, the tectonic shift that the Indian fashion industry has undergone in the last five years is testimony to how perceptions about handlooms have changed, year after year, yard by yard.

The Winter/festive 2016 edition saw textile trailblazers like National Award winner Anuradha Pegu, Darshan Shah of Weaver’s Studio and Bina Rao of Creative Bee, who may not be regular fashion magazine material, but added instant credibility to the line-up.

Varanasi boy Hemang Agrawal, scion of the Surekha Group textile empire, may have been ‘to the metre’ born, but that has in no way limited his desire to experiment and innovate. His second outing at LFW was a gold, silver and bronze coloured extravaganza called “Varak”. Clothes that looked like molten metal belied the experimentation that had gone into the creation of the weave. Agrawal had meticulously used metallic yarn in the warp and weft as well as the extra weft of the fabric, making it waterproof and almost akin to magical.

Amit Chakravarty Hemang Agrawal presented “Varak”