The Revival Project

 

 

Our summers were for chasing butterflies.  The garden, our grand mother’s biggest love, was full of them. Long lazy days of bicycling on sunny and rutted dirt roads, scraped knees, our grandmother’s food, canning pickle and grandpa’s stories.

Sometimes we’d sit on the porch swings for hours or take an afternoon nap in the hammock while some one hung up fresh wash and the spray of snapping petticoats and linens lingered on our skin. 

The stories of the hand woven gold taar saris and the weavers' lives enchanted us. In a family of women who understood the history and craft of hand weaving and collectively loved art the love for handloom was inherent in my sister and I. 

Whenever we were restless we were introduced to a new sari, from a new state.  It became our favorite guessing game. The beauty of some of those moments is like photographs. My grand father narrating the history of whichever textile he knew, my mother humming softly and my grandmother’s overwhelming love.

Fashion is as much about the invisible threads as it is about the visible ones. It’s an aesthetic shaped from an individual’s roots, background and memories. It’s a rebellion against them or an adaptation, and served to the world in all its glorified nostalgia.

The stories from our childhood shaped The Revival Project. The need to revive the craft of hand weaving and make it relevant in today's apparel is what drove it.