For Aratrikka — why I named my atelier after my daughter

I made my daughter Aratrikka's first lehenga when she was three. It was a small thing — barely a yard of fabric — in a deep maroon Banarasi silk that I had been keeping for a project I never got around to. I cut the lehenga, sewed the choli, and bordered the dupatta in a single weekend, working late into the night because she was going to her first Diwali party and her cousins were going to be there.

She wore it once. Then she grew. I had it framed.

She is fifteen now. I have made her a lehenga every year since — for Diwali, for cousins' weddings, for the dance recitals her grandmother insists on flying in from India for. The one I made her for her sixth birthday is the one I think about most. It was an exact miniature of a lehenga I had designed for a Sydney bride that same season — same colour, same embroidery, same fall — and watching them at the wedding, six and twenty-six, in matching pieces, was the closest thing to peace I have ever felt about my work.

I have spent twenty years dressing other people's daughters. At their weddings, their first sangeets, the engagements where their mothers cried before the cake was cut. I have been good at it. I have been busy at it. But for two decades I worked for other brands — designing under labels that took the credit and shipped to markets I never visited.

And then last year my mother, who is seventy-three and unsentimental, said: 'You should put your name on it.' She was sitting on my living-room floor at the time, hand-stitching a dupatta border because she didn't trust the karigar's gauge. 'Or your daughter's,' she added, after a pause. 'Whichever you can live with.'

I chose my daughter's. Aratrikka — and the brand we built around her name, Aratrikkaz — is not a tribute. It's a charge. Every piece we make is for someone's daughter. Some of them are six. Some of them are getting married next month. Some of them are inherited Banarasis being recut for a daughter's reception twenty years after the mother first wore them.

We design every piece in-house, here in Sydney. We work with weavers across India whose names I've learned over twenty years on the floors of their workshops — in Banaras, in Lucknow, in Kanchipuram, in Kutch. Every saree on our site carries the name of the cluster where it was woven. Every blouse is cut to your measurements, not to a standard size chart, because a standard size chart was never going to fit my daughter and probably won't fit yours either.

We ship worldwide. Duties prepaid, because if you live in London or Toronto or Singapore or Dubai you should not have to fight a customs office for the right to wear what your mother wore. We respond on WhatsApp within twelve business hours, in the timezone of whoever messaged us, because that's the kind of small business I want to run.

Aratrikkaz is named after my daughter. It is also, I hope, for yours.