There is a sentence that runs through Indian fashion online, almost as a chorus, and it is: “We curate the best of India for you.” It is a beautiful sentence. I have written some version of it myself, in a younger phase of this work. I want to use this letter to say, plainly, why I do not write it anymore.
Curation is a real craft. There are women I admire whose entire business is to walk through forty workshops in a year, choose the dozen pieces that should travel, and present them well. The honest curators are clear about what they are doing — they are editing, not making. They name the workshops. They publish the margin. They send the karigar a copy of the page their piece is on. That is curation done with integrity, and it has its place.
What we have on the larger Indian-fashion marketplaces is something else. A piece is bought at wholesale rate from a small studio in Chandni Chowk or Lower Parel, photographed against a plain wall in a flat in Andheri, and re-listed at a four or five times markup with a story about “artisans” that names no artisan. The same piece appears under three different brand names in the same week. The karigar will never see the listing. The customer in Melbourne or Toronto or London will receive a finished garment cut to a generic size chart, and the only person who has actually touched the cloth between the loom and the doorstep is the courier.
Aratrikkaz does not work that way. We are an atelier in the older sense of the word — design and make, under one roof in two countries. Every piece in this atelier begins as a drawing in our Melbourne studio. The drawing goes to a named loom or a named hand in a named cluster — Banaras, Lucknow, Kutch — with a brief, a colour reference, and a payment advanced at the start of the work, not the end. The piece comes back to Melbourne as cloth. It is cut to your measurements here, on a pattern that has been built around an Australian body and an Australian climate, by a pattern-master who has been doing this for longer than I have been doing it. It leaves the studio finished. With your name on the order, and the karigars' names on the inside flap of the bag.