I was in Ghornash early this year, visiting the village and meeting our hardworking weavers as this new fabric collection was just beginning to take shape. It is one thing to know a craft exists. It is another to sit with the people who carry it. Barun, third generation master weavers, told me how thrilled he was to bring some of these intricate weaves to life again. For them, this is not only work. It is a chance to celebrate what their ancestors started generations ago. A celebration of culture passed down and still continuing.
We started in the archives. Hundreds of motifs, sketches half finished and set aside, work woven decades before we ever saw them, patterns that have travelled down through generations of hands in West Bengal. We discovered them slowly, motif by motif, looking for the ones that resonate with Sanana. Some were too fragile to weave again. We think some had been waiting exactly this collection.
This weaving technique of Jamdani is not printed onto cloth. It is woven into it, thread by thread, by artisans who have spent lifetimes perfecting a technique that cannot be taught from a book or copied by a machine. Once the motifs are chosen, the real work begins, and it has nothing to do with speed.
We spent weeks deciding how each figure would sit beside the next. A motif on its own is beautiful, but a motif in conversation with the ones around it is something else entirely. We considered how they would complement each other across a length of cloth, where a colour needed to rest and where it needed to lift, which combinations would feel considered rather than crowded. Thread count mattered as much as colour. Every decision was made by hand, and every decision could be unmade and remade until it was right.
None of this happens quickly, and we would not want it to be rushed. In Ghornash, the yarn is dyed and then dried in the sun, colour building slowly over days rather than being fixed in minutes. It is spun on the chakra, the hand turned spinning wheel, often sitting in a courtyard between the ordinary day of a household.
When the monsoon comes, as it did this year, everything slows further still. Damp yarn will not behave the way dry yarn does, and a weaver's hands know this before we could even comprehend. So the pace surrenders to the weather, mother nature moves at her own pace.
A village full of weavers working on this collection with us. Spinners, dyers, warp dressers, the weavers themselves, each one part of a craft that is still, remarkably, being carried forward exactly as it always has been. What arrives in a wardrobe this Spring Summer will carry all of it. The archive it came from, the hours it consumed, the hands that shaped it and the rain it waited out.
We are honoured to be trusted with a craft this old. We are honoured that a village of skilled artisans are bringing this collection to life for us, and for the women who wear it, you are part of this complete story of creating the cloth. And we wait patiently to take you through this journey with us as it unfolds over the coming months, until the collection is finally ready to meet you.
Clothing as craft. Craft as kinship.
