A Tale of Traveling Textiles

Interior design and cushions: Studio Kahaani

I’ve been working on something that I’ll be sharing with all of you in the next month or so. Something that has me returning to my deep love of textiles and traditional handloom along with design and styling. I was sharing some of my excitement with a dear friend one recent evening. We had both managed to steal an hour to catch up with each other after our respective household dinner and bedtime routines. She was perched on our living room sofa, while I was cross-legged on the floor surrounded by fabrics and trying to describe my ideas to her. She took in the scene and reflected it back to me through the mirror that is true friendship: she commented that I looked at home and happy, sitting on the floor surrounded by samples and envisioning their future incarnations.

I realized that the circumstances were different but felt very familiar, echoing many childhood summers in India sat on the floor of our tailor’s shop. During those trips to spend time with family, visit temples, and maintain the connections that my parents so valued, we also had our annual haul of dresses stitched for me and my sister.

Each year as we planned our India trip, my mother and I would begin leafing through the massive Vogue and Butterick design books and marking dress patterns that caught our eye. We would then start collecting fabrics at textile stores that would eventually bring these frocks to life (my little girl visions involved pink satin and lace, my mother’s choices were more sophisticated). But the point was the exercise of envisioning something before it exists. As counterintuitive as it may seem to search for fabrics in Canada to take back to India for tailoring, the late 70s and 80s were a very different and closed economic context in India with limited access to a variety of goods. Handloom and some fabrics were available, but those were often crude and the ones that lent themselves to finer stitching were costly and not easily procured. So began our trips with suitcases bursting from all manner of gifts and items requested by cousins - jeans, tennis rackets, fountain pens, chocolates, and our own haul of fabrics.

Our tailor’s name was Sameer, a cheerful and affectionate Bengali man who operated out of a tiny shop in an old Calcutta alley. His floor space must have been no more than 12’x12’, and it was covered in fabrics and works in progress. Each year we would arrive from Canada, recover for a day or two, then walk our bundles of fabric and patterns over to his shop. He would see us approaching and already be shouting our names in his smiley Bengali accent: “Shothi, Shothi!” And we would leave our sandals on the broken sidewalk and sit for a few hours while my mother explained everything, spreading out the different fabrics and pinning pattern sheets to them. We stood while he took our updated measurements, and were given soft drinks while the adults chatted and my mother discussed all the sari blouses she also needed stitched. We would stop by over the course of the coming weeks for fittings or to say hello, and at the end of our two month stay we would collect all the finished garments. Many of which are frozen in time throughout the photo albums in my parents’ homes, and some of which are still saved in boxes.

As these summers continued, I took a more active interest in our designs and plans - tweaking patterns, finding unusual fabrics, and designing pieces from scratch. My mother stitched many of our dresses herself during the interim periods between India trips, her talents having been inherited from my grandmother - a prolific, intuitive, and prizewinning knitter. My sewing skills aren’t bad, but I will say that I have a pretty good understanding of textile design and application. And it was the flashback I had when sitting with my friend the other night that made me realize where my education began - on the dusty floor of Sameer’s small shop. I think the best part of exercising new creative muscles as an adult is realizing that they’re not new after all, but that they’re simply taking shape after decades of unconscious and instinctive pursuit. So I’m excited to come full circle now and will be sharing more soon - stay tuned!

A Sameer original, circa 1982.