“It’s called Dizzy Dahlia,” grins Andree Pouliot, holding out the pallu of her sari, printed with whimsical flowers. “It was inspired by a drawing my niece did for me.” She adds, “as for the colour it’s made by soaking the material with jaggery and scrap iron - mostly old horse shoes.” She pauses thoughtfully. “That’s the thing about what we do: it’s so labourious. And it takes so long. It doesn’t make big money. But we do it because we love it, and because we work with people who really love what they do.”
At the opening of Chennai’s first Soma boutique, Andree, the brand’s chief designer, discusses how it all began when she met her husband, Radhakrishnan Nair, in Jaipur more than 30 years ago. Both of them were fascinated with the block-printing process — he was with Anokhi then, while she was working for her mother, a Canadian designer. “My mother was quite the pioneer. She came here in the late 1970s and started working with Indian fabrics, which she then exported to Canada.”
Andree and Radhakrishnan eventually got married. “We had this dream of starting our own block-print business…” she says, adding with a laugh, “When you’re in you’re twenties, you think you can do anything!”
They started small. “How many were we?” She holds up one hand. “This many,” adding, “We did everything ourselves, from designing to packing.” It helped that Andree was a trained artist. “I had a lot of graphic art training. I also paint. So when I sat down to design my first block- print, I was using artistic experience from my international training and harmonising it with the Indian aesthetic.”
Their discreet, signature blend of Indian and Western aesthetics is still Soma’s biggest strength, she states. “There are a lot of people doing this work — Fabindia and Anokhi, for instance, are wonderful. There’s room for everybody, because we all have our own style.”
Soma began with an export order from Andree’s mother. “For 10 years, we only catered to the export market: Canada, Australia, Japan… We were growing at an organic rate.”
She adds, “Indian fabrics were popular even then. Especially with what I call my ‘yoga ladies.’ She explains, “It’s a catch-all phrase I use to describe Western people who are sensitive to Indian culture. And sensitive to synthetics.” The brand is now experimenting with organic cotton. “We recently found a good supplier and while it does make a definite social and environmental difference, it also makes for a better product: the cloth is silky soft.”
Holding up a set of intricately carved wooden blocks made of sheesham, still stained deep red, blue and green, she explains how each print requires a set of blocks, sometimes as many as 16.?“The designer draws the pattern; I insist on it being done by hand. Then artisans cut it into the block; we have men whose entire career is cutting the blocks by hand. It’s a very intense amount of work and it takes as much as three weeks to make one set.”
Despite the fact that there are easier ways to print these patterns, she insists on sticking to tradition. “Screen- printing is a much more commercial way to do it. And it’s not that bad: You have to be an expert to tell the difference. But it’s not the same product,” she says, holding out a colour-infused table cloth. “With screen-printing the ink is only on the surface. When it's block-printed, the ink is pressed into the fabric by hand. Which gives it a completely different feel… And a beautiful durability.
