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CONSTANT SEARCH: Priya Mani with her products.

Priya, who has one foot in Copenhagen (where she is textile design consultant, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design) and one in Chennai, speaks to me during a recent visit to the city while her work leaps at me vibrantly from her laptop. It includes bright checks for table linen, interestingly patterned saris, luxurious throws made out of silk and satin, a rug whose parts can be zipped together in various permutations and combinations, and one made out of tightly furled rubber bands. Another novel creation was the floor covering she made of recycled, shredded polyethylene films interwoven with lights. In 2003, she won the Elle Deco International Design Award for India for Student Designer of the Year award for academic excellence and in appreciation of work using unusual materials.

Having worked a good deal with weavers, the young designer is both amazed at their creativity and distressed by the problems they face. “Many reserved commodities for the handloom industry have been scrapped. The Handloom policy at the Centre has resulted in a few dichotomies. Many handlooms have been displaced by power looms and the handloom weavers get a raw deal. There is a large gap between the silk and the cotton weavers though in some clusters, the technique, skill level and expertise are the same for both. Master weavers control the trade almost totally. Design intervention has not always been careful and minimal and has led to a visual confusion between each regional fabric,” Priya points out.

As a teenager, she picked up the gauntlet when a neighbour in Coimbatore said the National Institute of Design was the place to be in for the creatively inclined. The NID was a revelation. “The place is highly dynamic, offering an amazing amount of freedom and stimulus for creativity,” she says. A UNESCO-PARZOR (Parsi Zoroastrian project) assignment landed in Priya’s lap when her professor asked her whether she would be interested in undertaking a study of Parsi embroidery. Her research covered over 250 families.

Yet another dimension of heritage swam into view almost simultaneously. This was connected with the Falaknuma Palace renovation project of ZEBA for the Taj group.

Special is her work on paper spiral.

A shift to Chennai led to a highly fulfilling tenure, as design consultant for Evoluzione. It lasted till 2007 when she got married and moved to Copenhagen. Priya now makes long sojourns in Chennai where she is engaged in projects with weavers.

“At Evoluzione, Atul Malhotra gave me a great deal of freedom to experiment. It was very exciting,” says Priya. “He wanted me to be involved with the export line. Among the products I designed were stoles and jewellery on paper spirals; the whole was inspired by garlic!” Soon after, she worked with Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna for their Spring-Summer 2006 collection.

Priya then made the jump from high fashion to handlooms where her heart lay. “My first interaction with crafts was immediately after the earthquake in Kutch. The stole which I designed as a student was made by the craftspeople of Kutch and displayed at the International Shibori Symposium at Harrowgate, the U.K.,” says Priya. In 2006, NID wanted her to work on a five handloom clusters project in Tamil Nadu for the Government Department of Handlooms and Textiles. Priya has recently completed a project on home linen with the weavers of Kanhirode. “ In Kerala it is amazing that the members have a stake in the cooperative society,” says Priya who has one more ace up her sleeve — she shoots her own products and how!

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