After a successful display at Lakmé’s Sustainable Fashion Day in February, The Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) returns for another showcase this week. Pairing three designers with handloom clusters across the country, the organisation facilitated a creative exchange by providing artisans with access to digital tools and mentorship. The premise of the collaboration, according to DEF’s founder Osama Manzar, is to ensure that weaving communities “are enabled to leverage the benefits of computers and the Internet”. This includes software training, establishment of e-commerce platforms, and social media marketing. Thanks to DEF, designers from three labels — Naushad Ali, Indigene and Three — were able to conduct remote workshops for weavers from Odisha and Uttar Pradesh, delving into topics such as “trending colours” and contemporary design.
Naushad Ali (Puducherry)
At SFD, Ali will present a collection of azo-free, handloom trench coats, trousers, dressers and jumpsuits made by the Musiri weavers in Tiruchiralpalli. “The fabrics are simple and honest, much like life in the agri-handloom-dominated village of Musiri,” shares Ali. “They usually weave saris and veshtis , but we’ve gotten them to do yardage for the first time, while retaining a lot of their typical patterns like checks and stripes.” Ali found the working relationship to be an easy and efficient one because “the artisans were always only a WhatsApp message away”.
Three (Delhi)
Even as she praises the initiative, founder Pallavi Dhyani — who collaborated with Barabanki cotton weavers from Uttar Pradesh — believes that real digital empowerment of artisans has a long way to go. The designer shares that her line will feature appliqué and quilting on travel-friendly dresses, high-waisted flared trousers, and jackets. “Handloom weavers often wonder about the long-term when working on a single collection like this,” she shares. “I intend to continue working with the fabric to create awareness, and hope to produce more collections of well-finished pieces that people will fall in love with, and not merely buy because it comes with a handloom tag,” she says.
Indigene (Delhi)
Slim fit pants, kurtas , jackets and kalidars in intricate, geometrically-patterned silk and cotton ikat weaves are what you will find in Indigene’s collaboration with artisans from Barpali and Nuapatna, Odisha. “Unlike their better-marketed Andhra counterpart, Odisha ikats have largely been about saris with large, animal motifs. But we found more ornate and time-consuming geometric patterns in older artisans’ archives,” shares designer Ruchi Tripathi, who founded Indigene with Jaya Bhatt. “We’ve worked with this and inspirations from Palestinian/Syrian hand-embroidery, to create an ornate, but very global look,” says Tripathi, who found tools such as WhatsApp and computer-aided design software to be an essential part of her collaboration with the weavers.
