Bangladesh is the second-largest garment producer in the world. Dhaka is its beating heart—the engine room of global fast fashion. From here, millions of shirts, jeans, dresses, and dreams are shipped every week to malls and apps across the world. They arrive clean. Ironed. Trendy. And unbelievably cheap. The real question is not how cheap […]
The Cheap T-Shirt That Cost a Childhood Read More »
Fast fashion has become the world’s most democratic luxury. A ₹299 T-shirt. A ₹799 dress worn once for Instagram. A new trend every two weeks. Cheap. Fast. Disposable. But clothes, unlike selfies, don’t vanish after use. They travel. And increasingly, they end up in India. Not in closets. Not in charity. But in mountains of
India: The Final Destination of the World’s Fast Fashion Guilt Read More »
From the window of a Vande Bharat train near Delhi, you see a different scene. On one side: aerodynamic coaches, digital displays, a train that can touch 160 km/h. A nation sprinting toward “New India.” On the other side: plastic, open dumping, stained embankments, the familiar grey-brown mess that follows our railway lines like an
The View From a Fast Train: What Vande Bharat Reveals About Us Read More »
India’s handloom sector is not just an industry. It is a living civilisation. For over 2,000 years, handloom has shaped India’s economy, culture, identity, and rural livelihoods. Even today, the sector supports more than 4.3 million weavers, nearly 75% of them women, making it the second-largest rural employer after agriculture. Yet this ancient system is
At first glance, it looks irrational. In an age of one-day delivery, flash sales, and instant checkout, why do thousands of people in Bengaluru and Mysuru line up outside government showrooms from 4 AM onwards just to buy a saree? Not a discounted gadget. Not a celebrity brand. A silk saree. The answer lies in
The Sacred Thread Unraveling When Mahatma Gandhi began spinning khadi in 1918, he wasn’t just creating fabric—he was weaving freedom, self-reliance, and environmental harmony into every thread. The charkha became more than a spinning wheel; it symbolized India’s rejection of exploitative British mill-made textiles and the embrace of natural, handspun cloth that kept communities warm
The Polyester Paradox: Has Khadi India Betrayed Gandhi’s Legacy? Read More »
There’s an old joke in policy circles: when the EU passes a law, the rest of the world updates its compliance manual. This time, the manual is about clothes. For years, Europe has been quietly rewriting the rules of fashion — Extended Producer Responsibility, bans on destroying unsold stock, mandatory sustainability disclosures, Digital Product Passports,
For most people, making a statement takes effort. Carefully chosen words. Carefully crafted images. Carefully built brands. For Usha Uthup, the statement was always simpler. She draped it. In a country of a billion voices, Usha Uthup did not try to blend in. She stood out — tall, baritone-voiced, fearless — and wrapped her identity
Draped in Destiny: Usha Uthup and a 50-Year Love Affair with the Saree Read More »
India is a young country with an old problem. Average age of an Indian citizen: 29 Average age of an Indian farmer: 50 That’s not a statistic. That’s a warning siren. We are a nation of twenty-somethings eating food grown by fifty-somethings, and quietly assuming this arrangement will continue forever. It won’t. Every day, more
Who Will Feed India When the Farmers Are Gone? Read More »
I didn’t start my latest fashion business because I saw a market opportunity. I started it because I saw a moral emergency. A couple of years ago, I looked closely at the fashion industry I had been working around for years—and realised something uncomfortable: Fashion is not broken by accident. It is broken by design.
