PICKING UP THE THREADS
Indian fashion designers are rediscovering the appeal of traditional textiles, and weaving a whole revolution out of them
In a sprawling farmhouse in Chhatarpur, New Delhi, Sanjay Garg, 35, pulls out a few pieces—a brocade silk pleated lehenga, a red silk sari with pomegranate motifs and a purple sari of archival value to explain what he is trying to do for handloom. “I want to revive the need and demand for saris. I am trying to make culture more relevant by mixing textures, making the blouse interesting, playing around with motifs,” he says.
Garg is not alone. The new story of India’s fashion is not design, it is textiles. And a new group of designers is changing the handloom story with design interventions that have transformed how urban India looks at handloom. Last year’s Make in India event by the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) featured 16 designers who worked with Banarasi textiles to create contemporary and traditional clothing. FDCI chairman Sunil Sethi says this was just the start.
Designers who work with handloom are making it aspirational. Handloom can’t survive on charity, they say. It is the business of fashion that is freeing handloom of its curse of “janata clothing”. This new approach is starting to make its mark. Many designers have made their careers synergising fashion with handloom with a focus on its timelessness.
“The weaving community is diminishing. Machinewoven handloom has a price advantage, but we can score with uniqueness of character,” says Neeru Kumar of Tulsi, who first began fashion’s affair with handloom in the ’80s when she started work with the Handicrafts and Handlooms Export Corporation of India, which gave her six looms in Delhi. “If the textile is strong, fashion happens easily,” she says.
In the global arena, Suket Dhir won the 2016 International Woolmark Prize, which recognises emerging designers across the world. Rahul Mishra won it in 2014. Both banked on handloom to envisage their collections. With their success, Indian fashion is finally finding its global foothold. “Made in India,” says David Abraham of Abraham & Thakore, “could be as potent as Made in Italy.” The potential is enormous. Thirtyfiveyearold Hemang Agrawal is a case in point— he runs a 40yearold family textile business in Banaras and works with leading designers in the country. His turnover has grown more than 300 per cent in the past four years.
Many others have bought into this argument of late. Though the number of people engaged in weaving and allied activities has gone down from 6.6 million in 199596 to 4.3 million in
“I am not reviving anything. My work involves creating new things with the crafts available”
2009-10 according to the Handlooms Census, the Comprehensive Handloom Cluster Development Scheme was introduced in 2008-09 for the development of mega handloom clusters. Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the India Handloom brand on National Handloom Day to endorse the product. A national workshop called Design Sutra was also organised in Bhubaneswar, where 15 National Institutes of Fashion Technology (NIFTs), private institutes and 25 weavers’ service centres decided to integrate NIFT course work with handloom and handicraft clusters.
“Today, designers are making themselves relevant by being associated with textiles,’’ says Garg. “We are not reviving textiles. Textiles are reviving designers!”
A NEW BEGINNING
Fashion began this textile intervention with David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore, who started using the double ikat weave in 1992. Two decades later, it is becoming clear that the only way India can make a mark in the international fashion arena is via handloom, which can’t be replicated elsewhere, says Rina Singh of Eka.
This shift benefits both designers and the sector. For example, Garg, a revivalist and an interventionist, has worked with Mashru from Gujarat and Banaras, Chanderi from Madhya Pradesh and brocade from Banaras, and jamdani in West Bengal.
His new collection is romance tinged with nostalgia. It is poised to sell in Singapore, Colombo, Dubai and Hong Kong. Garg says his turnover has increased a “thousand times” since he launched his label, Raw Mango. The list of stores selling his label is growing internationally, he says.
Others, too, have built their careers on handloom. Each has their own sensibility like Rina Singh, who believes in simple silhouettes, Samant Chauhan whose love for Bhagalpuri silk makes him an unapologetic proponent of the textile or Aneeth Arora of Pero, quietly popular in 60 stores across 20 countries, with handloom as her base and as many as 18 crafts in one garment.
The energy in the industry is infectious. Barely 20 days into her new portfolio, Union textiles minister Smriti Irani launched a Twitter campaign #iwearhandloom just before National Handloom Day on August 7. It went viral, with handloom enthusiasts tagging five others with each tweet. FDCI’s Sethi called his group of designers to post their pictures in handloom garments before they all left for Varanasi to celebrate the renewed hope for handloom with Irani. “I wear handloom and urge the citizens of the country too to lend their support for using handloom products to benefit lakhs of weavers,” Irani said in Banaras. She told designers she couldn’t afford their prices but asked them to help elevate the handloom revival in the country with their intervention.
A special budgetary allocation of Rs 6,000 crore was made in June for textile development intended to create 10 million jobs in the next five years, and to attract investments of $11 billion. An e-mail from FDCI has also asked designers to express interest in working in 28 government clusters for training craftsmen all over India. Announcements from designers followed. Anita Dongre will work with weavers from Odisha and veteran Ritu Kumar launched a textile revival collection. Lakme Fashion Week this August will feature Garg, who will unveil his collection in Mashru and silk with traditional motifs.
DESIGNERS LEAD CHARGE
They join several high-profile designers who are now increasingly at the forefront of making handloom fashionable. Rajesh Pratap Singh, 47, who has been working with weaves for about 20 years and is one of the strongest designers out of India, has his own loom set up in Neemrana.
He has worked with Sambhalpuri from Odisha, double Ikat from Andhra and Pashmina from Kashmir. “My work involves creating new things. I do research and development. But I am not running an NGO and I don’t believe in tags,’’ he says.
“My designs come from my environment and that’s what comes naturally to me. The only way we can emerge on the international scene is through textiles”
At the FDCI’s Make in India event at the Amazon Fashion Week last year, he showcased a small part of his collection that uses Kinkhab from Banaras. He says handloom needs to be elevated from a design perspective to make it sell globally.
In fact, designers continue to battle the perception that handloom is a poor person’s fabric of choice.
When Samant Chauhan’s mother attended his graduation project in 2004 at NIFT, Delhi, and saw the collection he made with Bhagalpuri silk, she asked him why he had worked with such coarse silk. The Bihar designer was awarded for his collection, and when he showcased his collection in Singapore in 2005, many say it became one of the biggest turning points in handloom fashion in the new millennium.
In 2006, he earned FDCI membership. That was just the start of a journey fraught with many challenges but at his newly launched store in Shahpur Jat, Chauhan says he owes it all to textiles from his state that were dismissed as too coarse for couture. He says his turnover has increased some 10 times in the past couple of years. He sells in New York and London at Anthropologie and Ashi & Co., respectively.
Chauhan was invited to the London Fashion Week to present his collection in 2008, and by 2012 he had launched his label Rajputana. “You can’t sell on sympathy or pride. The product has to be competitive. People don’t buy the sob story,” he says. His latest is handloom denim, a project with the Denim Club of India. “My ambition is to open a factory in Bhagalpur where I can process from yarn to a finished piece of clothing,” he says.
Gaurav Jai Gupta, 34, displays similar enthusiasm. “You could even weave your skin on handloom,” he says, as he flips through a portfolio of his work dating back to 2002. The swatches include weaves he did for his graduation project at the Chelsea
“Textiles have made me. You can’t sell on sympathy or pride. Product has to be competitive. People don’t buy the sob story” “My romance is with history. It is with identity”