A Note from Jaipur
Words by Bhaavya Goenka
I began weaving with discarded cloth in 2016 because I wanted to preserve a relationship. My mother had recently passed away. She had spent years working with what others overlooked, turning remnants into cloth-covered hangers and baskets, and teaching women to make them so they could earn an income of their own. Her practice was resourceful and practical, but it also carried a deeper understanding: that value is not determined by novelty, that skill can create possibility from what has been dismissed, and that a woman’s knowledge, however quietly exercised, can alter the conditions of a life.
I wanted to remain close to that knowledge. I also wanted somewhere to place my anger; the energising drive springing from the conflicted relationship I’d started to develop with impermanence.
At the time, I was surrounded by discarded cloth that could be woven into fabric. I knew this material could mean purpose and financial independence for women while allowing them to remain within their homes and communities. I knew it could become cloth of beauty, substance and permanence. What I could not understand was why this was not already happening as a system. Why were we not wearing it? Why was it not considered valuable? Why did the fashion industry possess such an extraordinary abundance of material, labour and intelligence, yet organise itself around depletion?
I searched for someone already doing this work, hoping I might join them. I found no one. But I knew the cloth was possible because I had already made it.
While studying textile design at the Indian Institute of Craft and Design in Jaipur, I spent two months in the weaving laboratory from eight in the morning until eight at night. Day after day, I worked with discarded textile, learning how its inconsistencies could become structure, how colour could be rebuilt through the loom, and how material considered unusable could acquire an entirely new integrity.
Those months gave me more than a proof of concept. They taught me that cloth carries the intelligence of every hand and decision that forms it. A textile is never simply a surface. It is a record of material, rhythm, tension, time and human judgement.
I knew this process could produce beautiful fabric. I knew it could create income for weavers. More importantly, I believed it could create prosperity, dignity and a different relationship between the person who makes something and the person who eventually lives with it.
I did not want to accept a world in which this remained only an experiment inside a design school. So, I began there.
Iro Iro did not begin with a business plan, or even with a question. It began with conviction. There was perhaps some naïveté in believing that a different system could be built simply because it needed to exist. Nine years later, that naïveté remains ever so strong. It has sustained us, and, somehow, it has become contagious. The people around Iro Iro have chosen to believe in this possibility too.
A friend recently told me that in Kannada, iro carries meanings connected to staying, wanting and being. After almost a decade of living with this name, I am still learning what those words ask of us.
To want is not simply to desire more. It is to imagine more truthfully what might be possible.
To be is to resist the pressures that require us to diminish ourselves in order to participate.
My ambition for Iro Iro is to exist and grow, one considered step at a time, with conviction. Over almost a decade, we have developed processes for which there was no established blueprint. The language around them has emerged just as gradually, through conversation and collaboration with weavers, dyers, tailors, designers, clients and the material itself. This work cannot be reduced to a single author. It holds the accumulated intelligence of many people, including knowledge inherited through generations and knowledge discovered through the demands of the present.
These processes will continue to evolve, perhaps into forms we do not yet have the imagination to foresee. That possibility is part of the work. So is the discomfort of questioning the global fashion industry, the expectations of the market, and our own ideas about identity, legitimacy and success.
I am writing this from a trade fair in Tokyo, established for Indian manufacturers to meet potential Japanese clients. Around me is a particular representation of Indian textiles and garment-making: diluted for export, negotiated principally through price, and too often shaped by a patriarchal understanding of who holds authority, whose knowledge is visible, and whose labour is expected to remain anonymous.
To stay is not to remain unchanged. It is to build with enough care that something can endure.
We have attended this fair for three years. For my parents, participating in an event like this once represented an important milestone. It meant that twenty years of work, risk and sheer persistence had received a form of industry recognition. Iro Iro exists within that history.
My parents built a garment-manufacturing business from the ground up. I grew up watching it take shape machine by machine, table by table, hand by hand. I remember waking at one in the morning. I remember listening to two tailors argue over the size of a stitch. I learned early that a business is built brick by brick, and that the cost of each brick is not only financial. It is emotional, physical and familial. It is carried into the home and absorbed by everyone who lives there. Now, from the other side of almost a decade spent building Iro Iro, I do not know how my parents did it while raising my sister and me.
My mother had been a lecturer in psychology and later a teacher. My father, a textile engineer, had worked for export houses. Both had experienced forms of exploitation in their employment. They chose to begin their own business because finding another job seemed to offer only a different compromise of the same dignity.
Their first opportunity came through transforming old saris into bags for clients in Italy. Later, they produced curtains and other textile made-ups for Japanese clients. A request from those clients eventually led them to establish a garment-manufacturing unit.
Their business was born from necessity, but dignity remained one of its boundaries. I watched them refuse orders of tens of thousands of pieces when fulfilling them would have required paying tailors less, weakening infrastructure or accepting conditions they could not defend. I also watched them pursue price targets as low as four US dollars because the market had taught manufacturers that staying competitive meant making more for less, and doing it faster each time.
This contradiction is not unique to my family. It sits at the heart of garment manufacturing.
From where I stand today, making clothing as cheaply and quickly as possible continues to extract a cost far greater than the price written on an invoice. It creates working conditions governed by anxiety. It compresses time until care becomes a liability. It turns skilled people into interchangeable units of labour. It gives buyers a form of power that is not only financial, but psychological, determining how manufacturers value their own time, knowledge and limits.
This system demands endurance, then mistakes that endurance for consent.
I recognise this logic as part of patriarchy because I have experienced it, inherited it and, at times, found myself participating in it. It rewards domination over reciprocity, speed over judgement, scale over sufficiency and relentless productivity over human wellbeing. It tells us that exhaustion is evidence of commitment and that care is an inefficiency to be engineered away.
Even at Iro Iro, where we have maintained more considered conditions for weavers, I know that intention alone does not place us outside this system. We must continue examining our decisions, listening to the people whose work makes ours possible, and recognising where inherited habits still shape us.
For too long, India has been presented to the global fashion industry primarily as a source of labour: a place of skilled hands, but not necessarily of respected authorship; a place where things are made, but where the philosophy, design intelligence and cultural knowledge behind their making are too easily separated from the final object.
This is not an absence of creativity or expertise. It is an absence of recognition.
The expectation that we must compromise our dignity to remain economically useful did not appear by accident. It has been reinforced by colonial systems of extraction and sustained by contemporary markets that continue to value Indian skill most readily when it is inexpensive, compliant and unnamed. Over generations, this can enter our understanding of what we are permitted to ask for: fair time, fair value, balanced lives, authorship and respect.
Iro Iro is our attempt to reclaim that self-determination.
We believe the people who weave, dye, cut, stitch and finish cloth are not instruments of production. They are holders of knowledge. Their decisions shape the character of every textile and garment we make. Respect for their work must therefore be expressed not only in language, but in timelines, relationships, remuneration, working conditions and the freedom to be recognised as dignified and respected human beings beyond their productivity.
We believe ancient and local knowledge should not be preserved as something static, decorative or nostalgic. It should be allowed to live. It must be respected deeply enough to change, respond and participate in the future. Tradition does not survive through imitation. It survives through use, inquiry and transmission.
We believe discarded material does not need to be disguised in order to become desirable. Its previous life is not an imperfection to conceal. It is part of the cloth’s intelligence and character. To work with it requires patience, attention and an acceptance that every material arrives with its own limits. Rather than forcing uniformity upon it, we ask what it is capable of becoming.
This is a radically compassionate approach to making, although compassion should not be mistaken for softness or sentimentality. It requires rigour. It asks us to consider the wellbeing of the land from which a material originates, the water and energy used to process it, the person whose hands form it, the community within which that knowledge lives, and the future into which the finished object will pass.
It also asks us to make less, more carefully.
I do not believe growth must mean acceleration without end. Nor do I believe ambition should require us to reproduce the very conditions we set out to resist. I want Iro Iro to grow through depth of knowledge, strength of relationships and the integrity of what we make. I want our work to prove that commercial life does not have to be organised around the exhaustion of people and the planet.
Our response to an extractive industry is not to withdraw from making. It is to make differently.
To make cloth that gives discarded material a future.
To create garments without erasing the hands that formed them.
To treat local knowledge as living intelligence rather than aesthetic reference.
To allow time to remain present in the object.
To build a business in which dignity is not the reward that follows success, but the condition from which success must begin.
Jaipur has long been a city of extraordinary textile knowledge. Its cloth carries generations of skill, invention and cultural memory. I want Iro Iro to represent this city beyond the familiar language of sourcing and manufacture. I want our work to speak of Jaipur as a place of authorship, contemporary thought and material leadership. A place where the future of fashion can be imagined with sophistication, responsibility and self-respect.
Chomu District.
Photograph by Prakrit Rai.
This is the legacy I have inherited, but it is also the legacy I am choosing to reshape.
I carry my mother’s ability to see possibility in what others had dismissed. I carry my father’s understanding of textiles and the structures required to make them. I carry the discipline of my parents’ factory, the arguments over stitches, the machines acquired one at a time, and the knowledge of what every brick demanded from our family.
I also carry the right to imagine another way.
Iro Iro is not a rejection of where we come from. It is an insistence that our knowledge, our labour and our ambitions should no longer have to become smaller in order to be accepted by the world.
We are here to make with care, to question without contempt, and to build without surrendering the dignity of the people who build alongside us.
We are here to stay, to want and to be. And we are only just beginning. Discover Iro Iro
Jaipur, 2026.