What do you think, MK Gandhi?

What would the Mahatma have made of a charkha on display at a posh London address? How would he, famously reluctant to embrace technology, have received the QR code on a khadi garment? Two Indian women celebrating heritage weaving traditions while employing European tailoring, demonstrate that Gandhi’s fashion system has multiple realities

More than 100-years ago in India, a man with a slight frame and round Windsor style spectacles sat behind a charkha to stir a social revolution. He created a deep link between political independence and personal empowerment using self-reliance and hand-spun cloth. He was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And the cloth that changed the fate of the nation was khadi. An insightful chapter by professor Peter Gonsalves in The Clothing for Liberation: A Communication Analysis of Gandhi’s Swadeshi Revolution discusses, Swadeshi—The Gandhian Fashion System as an alternative network that would promote through cloth and clothing an economic self-sufficiency (Swadeshi) powerful enough to establish self-government (Swaraj).

By inspiring Indians to spin desi cotton, weave and wear it, the sartorial became political, writes Gonsalves. Gandhi believed in the liberating aspect of hand-spun, hand-woven cloth, not merely to challenge colonial subversion but sustain the socio-economic welfare of weavers in India’s villages, while redefining the meaning of power, progress and civility.

Sujata Keshavan, founder and creative director, Varana

To coincide with Gandhi’s 152th birth anniversary that was celebrated yesterday, we applied the Gandhian Fashion System of alternative economics and significance of clothing to understand how two fashion brands—Varana and The IOU Project—have taken the Made in India chapter of handmade textile heritage to global prominence.

Varana is a Bengaluru-based sustainable luxury fashion house. It did something interesting in 2017. With the bold aim to bridge the gap between heritage Indian crafts and global fashion, it opened a four-storey flagship store at London’s Mayfair. Varana celebrates khadi, the oldest form of weaving cloth by creating museum-quality capsule collections underlined by an unmistakable pared-down sophistication; “It’s an acquired joy,” says Sujata Keshavan, co-founder and creative director at Varana, about the design aesthetic via phone call from London. “The tradition of weaving khadi has existed in India for centuries, but it was Gandhi who shone a light on it by using khadi as a symbol of resistance to British rule. As it is entirely hand made, no electricity is required in its manufacture, which makes it close to a zero-carbon footprint fabric. Khadi is the ultimate symbol of artisanal craftsmanship.” A wooden charkha sits in the store’s window display. It could be construed as a poetic primer to independent India. “It’s exquisite irony,” laughs Keshavan about the colonial address.

Kavita Parmar, founder and creative director, The IOU Project

India-born, Madrid-based Kavita Parmar launched an online platform called the IOU Project in 2011, with the Madras check weave at its focus. She believed it was the perfect metaphor for what industrialisation had done to the clothing industry. The young entrepreneur spent three months in the Cuddalore area of Tamil Nadu, visiting handloom clusters in villages including Naduveerapattu, to understand the reality of weavers. One Madras lungi (40 euros upwards), which uses two metres of fabric, takes between six to eight hours to weave on a loom run entirely by hand. That’s a whole day’s work. 

Madras checks are worn all over the world albeit with different cultural references. “For example, brands like Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren have marketed it as preppy East Coast style, and made it part of their identity-slash-brand Americana, when, in fact, the humble weave has roots in South India for the last 700 years. We wanted to give the denomination of origin back to these traditional weaving communities using the power of technology,” explains the project’s founder and creative director via email. 

A trio of jacket, shirt and trousers in Madras fabric designed by The IOU Project in partnership with handloom clusters in Tamil Nadu. J Crew and Polo Ralph Lauren are the brand’s chief competitors

When the IOU Project introduced moral standards of traceability and transparency in 2011, with every garment carrying a QR code, it wasn’t as common as it is now. Parmar hoped to  provoke customers into demanding honest information about supply chains and processes from mega brands too. “In fact, we started the hashtag #whomademyclothes to respond to this question. Unfortunately, it didn’t catch on until 2014, a year after the Rana Plaza incident occurred in Bangladesh,” she says of the 2013 tragedy where a factory building in Dhaka collapsed, killing over a thousand people and injuring close to 2,500. It’s believed that over 20 brands were doing business with the factories housed within, and therefore complicit in an environment that spurred the structural failure. 

The desire to protect heritage and a commitment to handmade, write itself as the solid fashion story that ties the two brands together. But it is experiments with a business model designed around cultural transposition that point to a holistic instead of a binary point of view. As if to suggest that the secret to success is to walk the fine line between the past (real or reconstructed) and the present and project both into the future. Both the above brands work closely with heritage weaving skills of India while employing the talent of global designers. This leads to cultural transposition, explains the UK’s Heritage Crafts Association (HCA) site. When you inject flexibility into traditional techniques, you create an entirely new product. 

Madras-Ramanujan scarf 

Varana has a multicultural design team that works out of their Bengaluru studio, and elsewhere in the world. The fabric and surface designs come from craft clusters in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Ladakh; it’s here that handmade jamdani, pashmina and khadi are developed. A team of NID-trained textile and graphic designers work with a lead womenswear designer from Italy and a knitwear designer based in Japan. “Varana is competing with global luxury brands so it was important to have an international team of designers who are trained in creative 3D pattern construction as well as couture design and detailing,” reasons Keshavan. “In India, we don’t have the tradition of sculpting and draping in our pattern making; our garments are cut flat. After all, our national dress is the saree which is just flat fabric.” The final garment comes together in India at their manufacturing unit. “It is a very interesting laboratory where the East meets the West.”

Parmar agrees. Indian artisans are excellent at weaving but not the best at, say, tailoring a jacket, as the sartorial culture of India is to drape fabrics. She works with tailors in Spain, Portugal and Italy for jackets and trousers. 

“We wanted IOWEYOU to be a catalyst of change, not just a brand. Each piece has a  human story and as consumers, we vote with our money, our purchases, and for the society we want to live in. If we continue to buy purely based on price and/or marketing gimmicks 
by brands, we are impoverishing our world.” 

Gandhi, my teacher

I’m a huge admirer of Gandhi. He was not intimidated by anyone, and his moral courage to do the right thing inspired a nation that is otherwise averse to taking risks. ‘My life is my message,’ is his philosophy, and he lived by example
Sujata Keshavan
 
I consider Gandhi my mentor. It is through him that I discovered John Ruskin. Gandhi translated his essay, Unto This Last, into Gujarati, and informed his ideas on Swaraj and the khadi movement. I believe in Gandhi’s advice: Everything you do in life will be insignificant but it’s very important that you do it anyway
Kavita Parmar

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