My first memory of khadi is through my late father. Before I attended my first fashion week, I had read enough to know that fashion shows could transcend the usual cycles of commerce and seasons to be moving spectacles. When Alexander McQueen staged his ‘Dante’ show (autumn/winter 1996) in a Baroque church in London, it screamed rebellion—gunfire opened the show, with tattered lace, military jackets and religious iconography storming the runway. Sabyasachi’s 2013 ‘Opium’ show conjured a decaying haveli, complete with crystal chandeliers. And who could forget Galliano’s Fall 1994 collection, crafted to perfection despite him being broke and sleeping on a friend’s floor?
When a fashion show becomes a true spectacle, it is reaffirming because it goes against the grain of conventional thinking. How can the runway move us? Or, make us quite literally cry? And yet, the Khadi India show, tucked away quietly in the middle of a busy fashion week calendar populated by star designers, did more for my grief than anything else.
When I was young, I was busy chasing trends and equated khadi to cheap kora. Once, my Dad brought home this grape-hued fabric to be made into a kurta for my mother from the now-defunct Khadi Grama Saubhagya store, close to our home, near the Chendamangalam weaving cluster in Kerala. My father told me better: “Khadi is so much more than what you’re taught in your history books, but the world is far too caught up in trends to see its potential.”
At fourteen, I listened, but didn’t hear him. Loss is a humbling experience. You don’t realise the depth of someone’s words until you can’t hear them anymore. When I attended Lakmē Fashion Week X FDCI for the first time last month, the Khadi India show was not in my sights, nor did I remember this conversation.
Despite all my know-how of fashion shows that could change minds and rethink narratives, I stepped into the venue for the Khadi show mechanically. It is one thing to see something online, but another to be physically present. Music, lighting and the set design are the products of many minds to create an experience. You just had to be there when Shubha Mudgal sang her renditions of songs by masters like Hazrat Amir Khusro and Zafar Shirazi for Rohit Bal’s ‘Gulbagh’ show in 2014 at the Qutub Minar.
As someone who’d grown up seeing Bal on TV interviews and Linen Club ads, seeing him dance down the runway for his ‘Kaaynaat’ show, what would be his swansong, made me well up, even on a grainy live stream. I knew of his waning health and that the world might soon lose him. Perhaps it is the fact that I had loved him as a designer for years that moved me so. One’s response to art is subjective, and while the ‘Kaaynaat’ roused those in attendance, the Khadi India show at Lakmē Fashion Week made me crumble.
As the lights dimmed and the Centre of Excellence for Khadi (CoEK) designs took to the ramp, Samandar Khan’s voice of Rajasthani folk radiating through the room, I felt a catch in my throat. After six years, the grief I thought I had laid to rest was resurfacing. This was a show I wouldn’t have even thought to live-stream. The hues on the runway reminded me of my Dad and his love for earthy tones, stripes and chevrons. While he would have loved to wear khadi exclusively, it was a luxury he couldn’t always afford. A big man in stature and presence, he would wear FabIndia Kurtas—inclusive in sizing and investment-worthy for a man who wanted his children to have a chance at the life he didn’t.
In the CoEK designs, I saw scarves layered into looks, reminding me of how I had handpicked a green block-printed cotton fabric for him. My last memory was of my mother draping it over him as we’d rushed him to the hospital. I wasn’t prepared for a fashion show to take me back to that clinical hallway. Despite the CoEk pieces acutely reminding me of him, the liveliness and the rhythm of the Khartal held me together.
As the notes to ‘Tu Jhoom’ by Deveshi Sahgal played, Nikasha Tawadey Khemka’s khadi festive designs came down the runway. As Sahgal sang of letting go, the grief I had held tight unfurled too. Finding respite in the darkness of the third row, I was reminded of growing up in a house that resounded with the music of Abida Parveen and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s music with Dad around.
As I took in Nikasha’s fluid drapes, crafted details and varied silhouettes, I wondered how I could have ever reduced khadi to a coarse kora. Rightfully named ‘Mahboob’, I thought that her collection was something I could wear, if I were to marry… and a question I didn’t even know I had was answered. My father had told me that he’d dreamed of seeing me as a bride in white, the norms of our community be damned. He had donned a grey-blue suit with bell bottoms in 1979, his daughter could hardly be a cliché. Whether I settle into the institution of marriage or not, I now know that I could wear khadi to honour him.
As the show came to close with KA-SHA’s separates with standout handcrafted details and a timeless play on symmetry, I was caught between admiring the contemporaneous takes on khadi, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s raw rendition of ‘Chaap Tilak’ and the implausibility of not being able to recount this experience to the man who had told me of the possibilities of the fabric.
I was raised to see fashion as art, craft as paramount and music as divine. And this experience felt like receiving a message from my Dad, in our shared language of weaves and verses—that I am on the path I am meant for, but now it’s time to move beyond my grief.
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