Uprooted

In many ways, this design collection tells my story of uprooting, of finding myself in global culture and still being me and feeling rooted…

The journey of Indian cultural clothes, arts and crafts inspire me.

The Indian Ocean was the seat of thriving trade since ancient times. Such trade was characterized by two main features: the centrality of India and the importance of textiles. Among the many areas facing the Indian Ocean, it was India that co-ordinated a trade spanning several thousand miles from the Horn of Africa to Southeast Asia, eventually reaching China and Japan, West Africa and Europe. Textiles – especially cotton such as calicoes and chintzes – were central in this exchange, and India’s productive skills and high-quality products were widely appreciated.

They were also cultural ‘connectors’: artefacts whose very materiality shaped notions of craftsmanship and design in cultural clothes that became widely shared across vast parts of the world.