Slowing the pace of fashion

Ashima Sehajpal Batish 

Experiences of life organically make their way into an individual’s creative pursuits. In a director’s film, a writer’s tome, an architect’s structure and a fashion designer’s creation, past and present knot several threads to give the product a final shape. So, each time Karishma Shahani Sha, a Pune-based fashion designer, sits down to create a blueprint of her new collection, she begins with retrospection. “What I designed five years back complemented circumstances, people I met and places I travelled during that time.” In her debut collection at the London School of Fashion in 2011, she chose bright, dark colours over the usual palette of nude shades. “I would miss India and everything about it so much. The colour scheme helped me cope with homesickness.”  

The present is no different. The world around her finds a narrative in her label Ka Sha. And it is not just her immediate surroundings that cast an effect, even distant but relevant subjects do — like, environment. She recently won the coveted International Fashion Showcase Country Award at the London Fashion Week (along with four other Indian designers), where she presented her collection inspired from the Rabari Tribe in Kutch. Excerpts from an interview.

What recent instances of your life have inspired your latest collection?

I am reading a lot on environment these days and that convinces me that fashion industry too has a responsibility towards a cleaner earth. Sustainable fashion has become the key word but it has its own challenges. While the industry across the world is waking up to long-lasting clothes that can be worn in different ways on several occasions and are constructed with upcycled material, couture is becoming far more swish. How to strike a balance between customised and sustainable fashion has become more important than ever before. My last collection tried to achieve it though introduction of layers. The separates can be worn and taken off according to the occasion, reinforcing sustainable fashion. Also, we don’t throw anything away, everything inside the workshop is put into use.

How do you decide upon the 

pricing of your clothes?

After market study and research, it was decided that the pricing should be between Rs 5,000 and Rs 25,000. Inclusivity of everyone at the design-house is important. A designer should earn money and even a karigar should earn. Also, the working conditions should be favouroable. All this isn’t possible by making the price tags lighter. In fact, that is also the reason I am not in favour of mass production, because there the margins are less and workers don’t get their due. Also, anything that comes cheap is usually discarded off easily, again leading to fast fashion and its environmental consequences.

Tassles and flowers are a staple to your collections. Why is their inclusion never amiss?

I have used both the elements so often that these have become signature of my collections. These add a lot of movement and fluidity to the garments. Not that I abide by any hard-and-fast rules, but the quirky, colourful elements are capable of adding drama to even ivory garments. Also, these help me upcycle a lot of fabric that gets wasted in the process of making clothes. Like, I made a hand-knotted shawl from fabric scraps. 

You have often talked about designer-waste management. Please elaborate on the same.

I am inquisitive about how do designers dispose of the waste material at the workshop. I hope to begin a venture where in ‘used-less’ fabric and accessories will be collected and then sorted out to be used and experimented upon. This propels the idea of minimize wastage, and maximize sustainability. Ideally, it should begin with large corporate houses involved in mass production of clothes. My collection of 2014, Heart to Haat, entirely done with upcycled material, may be able to prove how waste can have a worth. 

Concept saris from your label are a big hit. What is the idea behind the breakaway sartorial pieces?

I love sari as a garment but to render it a universal appeal, it becomes imperative to give it a twist. So I replaced pallu with a wide frill, a blouse with a trench coat and even reduced the length till calves. The base, however, remains the same. Cottons, Banarsi silk, Chanderi, Mul and Mashru silk is used to craft clothes. Even the colour palette is very typical of what is found inside Indian women’s wardrobe.