Inamed her, and then I named her atelier — and I want to tell you, honestly, why I did it in that order. Aratrikkaz is for Aratrikka. The name on the door is the name on her birth certificate. I have heard, more than once, that this is a sentimental thing to do with a fashion house. I have decided to keep being sentimental about it.
Twenty years before Aratrikka was born, I was already standing in workshops. I was nineteen the first time a master weaver in Banaras let me touch a kadhua butti before he had finished it — the silk still warm from his hands, the silver-gilt zari sitting just proud of the ground weave. He did not tell me it was beautiful. He told me how many hours it had cost him. That is the conversation I have been having, in one form or another, ever since. With Lucknow chikan-workers who sew by lamplight. With bandhani women in Kutch who tie ten thousand knots before the cloth ever meets dye. With a pattern-master in Melbourne who can read an Australian body the way they read a loom-card. The craft did not arrive with the atelier. The craft arrived first, and I followed it for twenty years before I dared to put a name on what I was doing.
The moment of the name itself was very quiet. Aratrikka was a few weeks old. It was the small hour after a feed when the house is asleep and the only light is the one above the kitchen sink. I was holding her, and I had a notebook open on the counter — I had been keeping a list of words for a year, the way some women keep a list of names. Most of the words on that list were Sanskrit, some were place-names, some were the names of weaves. None of them were hers. I closed the notebook. I wrote her name at the top of a clean page. And underneath, without thinking about it very hard, I wrote: Aratrikkaz. The "-z" was already there. I had not planned it. I had simply ended her name with the small sound that, to me, has always meant "and those who belong to her". The plural. The inheritance. The everyone-else.
People have asked, kindly and otherwise, why the spelling sits the way it does. Why "Aratrikkaz" and not "Aratrika" or "Aratrikha". The honest answer is that the "-z" is a small piece of diaspora grammar. It is the way her name will be pluralised in an Australian classroom — "the Aratrikkaz", the other girls who share her seat, her city, her wardrobe. It is also the small marker that this is not only her atelier; it is all of theirs. The "-kk-" doubles because the Devanagari अरात्रिक्काज़ doubles in the mouth, and I refused to soften the sound for an English keyboard. The wordmark holds its accent the way she will hold hers.
We carry the name in both scripts. अरात्रिक्काज़ on one line, Aratrikkaz on the next. I think about this a great deal, because I think about what she will see when she is old enough to read what is above the door. She will see the script her grandmother reads, and the script her teacher reads, sitting one above the other without one having to apologise for the other. That is the whole brand, in two lines. That is what I want every daughter who walks into one of our pieces to feel: that both of her languages are already on the label, already dignified, already the same size on the page.
I am asked, often, whether we curate. We do not curate. Curation is a beautiful word that has been worn thin by people who buy finished cloth from a wholesaler in a marketplace and re-tag it. Aratrikkaz is an atelier in the older sense of the word. We design in Australia and we make across India. Every piece begins as a drawing in our Melbourne studio, goes to a named loom or a named hand in a specific cluster, comes back here for pattern-cutting and finish, and leaves with your measurements cut into it. The atelier is not a shopfront with good taste. It is a small set of women and men in two countries who have agreed to make one wardrobe together.
The clusters are not a marketing list. They are the four places we have earned the right to work. Banaras, for the kadhua and the jangla and the tilfi — for real silver-gilt zari pulled on real silk by weavers whose families I have known for fifteen years. Lucknow, for chikankari worked on white muslin by women whose stitch-counts I can identify by sight. Kutch, for the mirror-work and the bandhani that the women there learned from their mothers and grandmothers and that they have, against considerable economic pressure, refused to industrialise. And Melbourne, for the pattern-cutting and the finishing — the part of the wardrobe that turns Indian cloth into an Australian life. Four places. Named. Dignified. Paid in advance, on terms we publish.
I called this letter "For Aratrikka" because the first audience is one girl. But I want to be honest about why I think it scales outward. The girl I am dressing in this atelier is not only mine. She is the daughter of a friend from Parramatta who has, the week of Diwali, six dinners and no wardrobe. She is the doctor in Auckland who has not worn a saree since her wedding, and wants the next one to be hers. She is the lawyer in Singapore whose mother is flying in for a sangeet, and who wants the piece she'll wear again the following week. She is the woman in London who has decided that her festive clothing should be a wardrobe, not a once-a-year compromise. For every one of those daughters, we cut. For every one of those daughters, Aratrikkaz is also their name.
The next collection is already on the loom. There is a dawn-grey Banarasi that has been seven weeks in the making, and there are four chikankari kurtas in unbleached muslin that the Lucknow studio has been finishing through this week's rain. There is a bandhani that I have not yet photographed because I want Aratrikka to be the first person to see it dyed. There will be a daughter, in some city I have not yet been to, who will wear a piece from this atelier to the first occasion of her adult life. I do not know her name yet. But I have already named her atelier.
