Chinar Farooqui lives in a blissful bubble, ignoring the pace at which fashion moves past her. “I don’t believe in seasonal fashion or trend. It doesn’t drive me. I am in no hurry to get my designs on every person or in every home. Maybe I am too simple for fashion, for the Indian market,” she says. Before we could label her way of thinking unconventional, she tells us how it is all very traditional. “For me, textile comes first, just like old times. Weaving has to be in place before anything else. Design has to be guided by material and the process.”
What Farooqui is telling us may sound strange, if you go by the working methods of most designers. They typically sit with their mood-board, sketch designs, select fabrics and give their drawings to a weaver or master tailor to give them final form. Not Farooqui. She first zeroes in on the kind of textile—cotton, khadi, kala cotton from Kutch—that she wants to work with at that point of time. Then she sets out to find people to collaborate with; people who are creating the textile she’s looking for and are as passionate as her about threads, warp and weft.
“It is difficult to find weavers and craftsmen who are ready to go an extra mile to create handspun, handmade textile,” she says. Farooqui found a perfect collaborator in Shyam Ji Pai, a master weaver from Bhujodi, on one of her trips to the textile hub in Kutch. Now, she has 50 people cutting, stitching and finishing the products in her factory in Jaipur but she lets the weavers work from their homes and at their own looms. She also works with weavers from West Bengal.
“Last winter, I visited Kashmir to find the weavers who are still working on old-fashioned, narrow looms. I had a hard time getting the real handspun, handloom pashmina. Everyone seems to have switched their brains off to match mass orders,” she says.
After four years of designing apparel for her label Injiri, she started designing for homes. But her philosophy remains the same. “I don’t do 1,000 pieces. I enjoy small volumes so that I can keep going back to it and improve it,” she says.
A textile designer by training—she is a NID Ahmedabad alumnus—Farooqui has showcased her designs at fashion weeks (in Delhi and Mumbai) before she decided to do what was close to her heart: developing textiles that cut across fashion sensibilities, can be used in every form and yet stay true to our roots. Her home label is retailed across the world. In India it’s available at Amethyst, Chennai; Anonym, Hyderabad, and RainTree, Bengaluru. “I have been criticised for my designs. Someone dubbed it to be of her grandmother’s generation. But I am fine with it. I don’t think there has to be a surprise element to sell your product,” Farooqui says.
Her success (both commercial and cerebral) in the last five years has taught her to not give in to the buyer-driven philosophy. There is another problem she wants to tackle. “Imitation is a real issue, both for the weavers and designers. I am working with Bhujori weavers to develop a textile that would not be reproducible,” she says. Now, that is what we call commitment.