La forma delle cose di tutti i giorni

La forma delle cose di tutti i giorni

Words by Matthew Needham

Archetypes refer to the shapes, silhouettes, forms, and functions of everyday objects. We were never taught them. We learnt them over time, and we accept them as inherent. If we take a moment to look closely at these archetypes, we notice the details we take for granted, the designs we accept as the norm, the familiar forms we have stopped questioning: the shape of a T-shirt, a pair of trousers, a kurta.

A chair. A door handle. A bag. A pair of shoes. Few of us can recall the moment we first learnt what these objects were for, and yet, asked to draw one from memory, we would all produce variations of the same image. To most of us, these forms feel anthropological rather than authored, emerging collectively over thousands of years. So much so that they have become less designs than agreements, blending into our surroundings until we stop looking at them altogether.

Your experience of an object depends on the context you are viewing it from. If you were based in Jaipur, you might see a kurta and understand its cultural importance, its religious iconography, and its place in painting, sculpture, and theory throughout history. You might recognise it as a garment carried through Persian and Central Asian courts into the Mughal wardrobe. Elsewhere, you might see simply a shirt, longer in the body, with a side slit flaring out from the hip. The difference between the two perspectives is not the object. It is who is looking, and what they are prepared to see.

Context matters here. A kurta may be worn on a runway, or in a village in rural Rajasthan, where a weaver takes waste collected from a garment factory producing for global markets and reweaves it into new cloth, before it is cut and tailored. Waste, that is, as we in the West have chosen to define it.

To the weaver, the kurta may be a humble garment, an archetype of everyday life, something of both low and high significance at once. This is where the question of value comes into play. How do we place value within the system of fashion? Who benefits from that system, and who is asked to bear its cost? The legacies of empire have left their mark on Indian garment manufacturing so deeply that people's livelihoods are still put up as capital, treated as disposable, and spent so others might profit.

For the past decade, Iro Iro has built on this conversation, structuring its supply chain to address that imbalance directly. In 2026, Iro Iro is reasserting what it means to be a master of weaving, a master of craft, and repositioning where value lies and who profits from it.

Untitled (cands and string), from Platform × Gucci. Photograph by Prakrit Rai.
Jaipur, 2026.
Untitled (cands and string), from Platform × Gucci. Photograph by Prakrit Rai.
Saaya Blazer,
MWBW, 2026.

Where do we place value in a product? Is it in the fabric? Is it in the skill? Is it in the fingertips of the weaver, or in the scissors of the cutter in the garment factory?

Part of this is witnessing the weavers at the loom, under the blue tarpaulin canopy in Chomu, Rajasthan. Masters of a craft learnt slowly over time, they hone their specialism until their fingers become intertwined with the threads. They can weave and reweave without thinking, simply by looking at the fibres, the warp and the weft, in front of them on the handloom.

A decade ago, Iro Iro started with a conversation about building on a history that has been rewritten and written again, and telling it through a new lens. Not a fetishisation of India, or of Indianness, or of cultural exploitation, but a platform for the subtle details and nuances, to be seen on their own terms. The kurta is an archetype, not a stereotype: a shape to live inside rather than an image to be looked at.

Value lies in the skill and the cultural legacy it carries. Cloth of this quality, woven by hand in rural Rajasthan, is as valuable as anything made by a petite main in a Paris couture house.

Untitled (cands and string), from Platform × Gucci. Photograph by Prakrit Rai.
Weaving Village steps,
Jaipur, 2019
Photograph by May Ee Fong.

The difference is not in the work. It is in who gets paid for it, who gets named for it, and who benefits from the system it sits inside. The shape of everyday things stays the same. What changes is the value we are willing to see in them. Discover Iro Iro

Untitled (cands and string), from Platform × Gucci. Photograph by Prakrit Rai.
Kurta Shirt,
MWBW, 2026.