Brass Tacks turns 10 this month and, as with many milestones in business, I find myself in the awkward position of having to report numbers. People ask how many stores I have and what my plans for growth are, but all I can see is how I birthed an idea that has turned into a community of people who speak the same language, how the context of handloom and fashion has changed drastically in India in the last decade, and how my team and I are growing a business without compromising on our design values.
For most creative people, design is a way of communicating with the world. To pour yourself into something you have created and then have people buy your work is, in a sense, their way of telling you that they understand your language and vision. Commercial success is useful and important, but nothing trumps the validation of your work being understood.
CHENNAI : 08-08-2017--- Apparel collections of Designer Anaka Narayanan at InKo Centre in Chennai. Photo: K.V. Srinivasan
Handcrafted love
When I started my first collection, with a pattern-maker and one tailor, out of my parents’ living room, it was important that I solve a certain problem through design. The problem, as I perceived it then, was a void in the market for well-designed clothes tailored from natural, hand-crafted textiles, with modern silhouettes. But sometimes it takes digging a few feet into a problem to understand its real depth. In the early 2000s, the perception of hand-crafted textiles was very different from what it is today. The cheap quality available in the market had given handloom a bad name. A popular joke about colour fastness at the time was “buy one, get three”. Handloom also had connotations of being frumpy. (This is probably the result of years of pitching khadi as the go-to fabric because of its ideology, rather than its inherent beauty.)
CHENNAI : 08-08-2017--- Apparel collections of Designer Anaka Narayanan at InKo Centre in Chennai. Photo: K.V. Srinivasan
This misconception made me realise textile crafts was not on the same page as contemporary fashion, and that my end products had to be really well made. I decided to tackle it by choosing fabrics carefully (strong but soft to the touch, fluid enough to drape, but structured for a tailored garment), working with craftsmen who understood quality and precision, and making sure the silhouettes factored in comfort, movement and functionality. For example, our last Spring-Summer collection was made entirely from handwoven textiles, many of them khadi — which means the yarn itself was handspun — and many using natural dyes. The silhouettes were clean, with attention to cut and tailoring quality, but they were also functional (there was a phiran -inspired dress that had zero wastage, a tapered khadi cotton dress with jamdani motifs that was cut in a way that allowed one to walk with wide strides, and a sleeved day dress that flattered the form but still allowed easy movement). By making design the most important factor in my work, I felt confident I could tackle the problems plaguing handloom: quality and the unfashionable tag.
A decade later
The most heartening change in the last 10 years has been the reception handloom textiles has received. Earlier, I was wary of using the words eco-fashion too frequently; I wanted my work to stand on its own, without the preachy speech on khadi and weavers. There was also this expectation in the market that cotton had to be cheap, regardless of whether it was handwoven or the yarn was tie-dyed by hand before it was woven.
CHENNAI : 08-08-2017--- Apparel collections of Designer Anaka Narayanan at InKo Centre in Chennai. Photo: K.V. Srinivasan
Today, there are many tasteful fashion labels in the country that work with hand-crafted textiles and the language that’s used to describe them has changed. There is a lot more consciousness about the work and skill that goes into these crafts, and there is a high level of eagerness among consumers to learn how their clothes are made. Along with this has come the understanding that cotton is a fibre, and every craft process adds value to the final textile, which in turn gets factored into the price tag.
Changing mindsets
CHENNAI : 08-08-2017--- Apparel collections of Designer Anaka Narayanan at InKo Centre in Chennai. Photo: K.V. Srinivasan
Visible proof that the dialogue related to handloom has changed can be seen at the Lakmé Fashion Week today. The same event that saw only bling and embroidery in 2007 now has a day dedicated to sustainable fashion, and that space is occupied by talented designers who bring a richness to their work through handwoven textiles.
It’s not easy to change the mindset of a population and this is perhaps the biggest contribution that designers working with handloom textiles have made in the last decade (I don’t mean to take any credit away from the craftsmen who are the real designers behind the textiles). Growth, scale and commercial success are important, but if those were the only things that mattered, hand-crafted textiles wouldn’t stand a chance against their mill-made counterparts. The challenge lies in finding a way to grow while staying true to core values, and for that we must learn to think of designer-entrepreneurs as communicators of a certain ideology first, and businessmen second.
The author is Creative Director and Partner, Brass Tacks.
