fashion + sleep + work

we cannot compete with you
prancing around in the nude
but we promise to be
your second most comfortable
all day, everyday wardrobe.

Historically, how clothes ‘help the body function’ has been of utmost importance when one is designing workwear. From long johns to denims—we bring these two technical approaches to clothing—through the lens of sleep (dreaming) and the lens of work (producing), together in our permanent him/her/they collection for everyday dressing.

We have seen home and office, private and public, online and offline worlds blending into one. We collaborated with a ‘sleep textile specialist’ with over 25 years of experience working on fabric innovation (with experience working in India and in Japan) to bring the ‘safety’ and ‘freedom’ encapsulated by sleep into your workwear wardrobe. Special steam treatments, enzyme washes and bio treatments are applied to our fabrics to create clothes for you that feel like a lover’s touch with the functionality of uniform dressing. Our clothes are aimed at catering to creatives with more flexible work formats—our collars are intentionally floppy, never stiff.

Wake, eat, meditate, work, dance, ease, nap and (as they wear out) sleep in them—let them grow old with you!

fashion + circularity + poo

Let’s consider for instance, the idea of a heated public swimming pool and a supermarket; both produce wasted energy. One from heaters, the other from coolers. Two solitary guzzlers in the same neighbourhood. Could they both be designed next to each other, designed to barter energy gained for energy lost? Could the hot air extracted from refrigeration in the supermarket not sufficiently heat the swimming pool? The technical engineering answer to this question is yes. And yet, the overriding contemporary logic of indiscriminate scale that most industries follow doesn’t approach problems this way. Instead their approach tends to be:
Poo-down.

Getting as much as possible for as little as possible, as quickly as possible, without considering the cost to the environment or the human spirit. With the advent of Henry Ford’s implementation of the assembly production for automobiles, the industrial revolution kicked into over-drive (in the way that mono-cropping triggered the agricultural revolution or in the way that ‘the selfie’ opened the pandora’s box that is social media). The method for mass-production started within one company, one factory and one industry. And soon the ‘race for repetition’ it proposed, took over all production systems. It became a pervasive artificial intelligence of sorts, enabling mass-consumption and hyper-capitalism.

In a flash, for better or worse, the world was thrown into excess, instantaneity and never ending consumption. Supply soon became abundant and desires instead started to be manufactured. The by-product of this was standardised over-production of goods (which implies a total denial of the planet’s limitations to produce natural raw materials) and a mass slowing of skill learning and upward mobility for labour classes in producing economies. The reduction of ‘play and pleasure’ in making the things we consume; made these jobs less and less desirable; many taken by people in desperate situations. Now, one could argue that the globe is split between lands of producers and lands of consumers. Their realities most often—could not be further apart.

Everyone knows that in India cows are given the right of passage on sidewalks. A cow run-in on an evening walk in Bombay’s crowded Nanachowk market (full of makers from cane crafters to metal welders)  prompted us to use a random cow fact to elucidate just how counter-intuitive big industry is today. Did you know that cows can climb up stairs but are not biologically programmed to go down stairs? So let’s say you were to walk a cow up to a roof-top for a gander. The easiest way to bring it back down to the ground level is probably to harness the cow to a helicopter, lift it off the building and then fly it back down. So this would qualify as one of the least practical decisions a human ever made. Yet most supply chains work this way: Climb now, worry later, then blame it on gravity.

Instead we prefer to draw learnings from the non-linear, complex but full circle production systems we observe in nature—anything produced by the earth can and will be easily returned to it—leaving nothing but a trace, overtime.

fashion + water + fishies

The Mckinsey Fashion Report from 2020 states that “Fashion accounts for 20 to 35 percent of microplastic that flows into the oceans and outweighs the carbon footprint of international flights and shopping combined.”

Out of the twelve fabrics we have spent the last 8 years developing—the ten that we have chosen for our him and they collections are 100% natural (cottons and silks suited for summer weather or indoor use and layering throughout the year). This means they are bio-degradable, which also means they release no micro-plastics.

With the remaining two fabrics used in our her collection that do have a synthetic yarn blended into a natural base, we have been very careful not to cross the 4% limit of elastane / polyester in the blend—ensuring that these fabrics will at least still de-compose on their own, while keeping their micro-plastics to a minimum.

We want to be clear, we are not advocating for people to abandon synthetic fabrics altogether but instead—suggesting they could be selectively incorporated into ones wardrobe, as unfortunately they are more destructive to the planet. Meanwhile we are simply working towards providing you a healthy range of material alternatives that are less upsetting to our water gods and underwater friends!

We also make sure not to use any plastic in our packaging. All our products are dyed and fabric washed for softness by hand. However, we do use chemical dyes—originally we tried using natural dyes since we did not want to contribute chemical run-offs into the city’s water systems. Unfortunately, we could not achieve our unique palette and found that the color just didn’t last as long and the faded look doesn’t suit our product. And so, we searched for another solution; we rented a space in a machine dyeing mill that has an expensive and effective effluent plant (ETP). With the help of this technology, it allows us to treat the water and re-cycle it, thus managing the damage.

fashion + soil + mycelium

Over-production of fashion crops is one of the big causes of deforestation and desertification. Dead stock either lands up in landfills, get dumped in the ocean or gets burnt/ destroyed. It is a negative supply chain.

The Mckinsey report 2020 among many others, explains why organic cotton is not an adequate industry solution: “Organic-cotton production is unlikely to be realizable at scale and achieve the efficiency of conventional systems. Currently, its market share is just one percent of the total cotton market. It typically yields 15 to 25 percent lower harvests and has more volatility during the production cycle. What’s more, converting agriculture production systems to organic is challenging, especially for small-scale farms, as the conversion process can take up to three years.” The only real way to curtail mono-cropping and overproduction of fashion crops, is to cut down the supply.

In our opinion this industry, like most, doesn’t need to just find new ways to ‘sustain’ itself—it needs to step by step totally re-invent it’s culture and systems from the ground up. We do not claim to have all the answers to this Rubik’s cube; but we are trying to do things in our own way, keeping these challenges in mind. This is why we:

1)    Only produce a piece after an order is placed to keep out inventory. Keeping our stock down to just our design samples (3 big cupboards at the moment from the last 8 years) and our scraps (that we collect) – and every few years we do something creative with them. Much of the experimenting for our experimental designs is done using a mix of our archive and our scraps.

2)    We only dye our raw fabrics once an individual order is placed to avoid collecting stock of fabrics in colors, or prints that have a shelf life.

3)    We build our product to last (and warn you that they require extra care to maintain that super soft feeling that grows as you wear them).

4)    We strongly discourage unnecessary returns and exchanges because it can only be supported by an inventory model somewhere down the chain, which most often means the creation of a lot of waste, or the destruction of a lot of goods and fabrics.

5)    We are trying to build a culture around ‘intentional’ buying to compliment ‘impulse’ buying.