Every design we make has a story connected to it. There are real people behind it, weavers, artists, tailors, and on the other side there are customers who connect with it. They want to know where it comes from, what material it is and whose hands made it.

The messy part is that a lot of these suppliers and weavers are lost in a vacuum chamber. Outside their village or their cluster, hardly anyone knows they exist. That's what I do, I bring them out.

It is equally about the process, but the story takes precedence. The process follows the talks and the ideas, and slowly they take shape.

New in the shop, the cream handloom tweed jacket. Handwoven wool tweed with a relaxed, Tibetan inspired cut.

01 · The people

The people behind the cloth

These are some of the people whose stories are in the pieces we are making right now.

Kullu · Himachal Pradesh

Bhuttico

An old weaving cluster in Kullu, the Bhutti weavers co-operative, not too far from us in Dharamshala. The black merino wool for the chupa shirt we are making right now comes from them.

Bina Barah · Sagar, Madhya Pradesh

Shramdaan

Run by monks, in a Jain temple complex, and always seeking something new on the loom. When I was there, a young technician could look at a piece of fabric and work backwards to recreate it on the loom. Our white handwoven cotton comes from here.

Bhujodi · Kutch, Gujarat

Haresh ji, HR Handloom

Constant and persistent about preserving kala cotton handloom. I met Haresh ji at an INTACH exhibition in Delhi. 90 metres in eight colours are now on the way to us.

Bhagalpur · Bihar

Matka silk

Samples of Arsi, Ghicha and Ari from a handloom self help group.

Murshidabad · West Bengal

Ghosh and Organic Fashionary

Hand spun, hand woven cotton, linen and silk, vegetable dyed for us.

02 · The process

How a story becomes a piece

Once the talks turn into a design, every piece gets written down on our platform, the garment, the fabric, the colour, the sizes and the small details. For the Butterfly Shirt with lace, I wrote in the brief:

No visible overlock on the inside.

from the Butterfly Shirt brief

Then the work gets split, and every workshop does the part it is best at. The chupa shirt, made for one person, goes like this:

Step 01

Weaving

Bhuttico weaves the black merino wool in Kullu.

Step 02

Embroidery

Embroprint does the embroidery first.

Step 03

Stitching

Then Sharlho stitches it here in Dharamshala.

Prince Tailors, also in Dharamshala, is stitching three pairs of handloom denim trousers. Ksaman Naturals in Bhubaneswar is making four cotton and silk robes for a brand we work with, and the fabric left over from every robe becomes shawls.

03 · The people who wear it

Wearing dreams

The customers who come to us are looking for these connections. They want to know that the wool was woven in Kullu, that the cotton came from a monk run centre in Bina Barah, that Haresh ji is working to preserve kala cotton in Kutch.

When they wear their design, they are wearing dreams.

New in the shop

If you have a story you want to wear, we can make it for you too, you can start your own design on jaalyantra.com. And if you would rather have something already made, here are some of the newest pieces from the shop.