Weaving A Sustainable Future

Brinda Gill talks to Ashita Singhal, awardwinning weaver, designer and social entrepreneur, and founder, Paiwand Studio, who is committed to converting textile waste into new, meaningful textiles.

- Brinda Gill

This led me to set up a studio, with a team of artisans and weavers, to collaborate with designers to repurpose textile waste, from their studios, into meaningful textiles. These textiles are then transformed into designer apparel.”

THE CALL OF TEXTILES

Ashita had done a graduation in commerce; however, the call of textiles saw her enrol for the Post-Graduation Program in Fashion Design at Pearl Academy, New Delhi, (2016-18).

During an internship with Amrich, as part of the course, she observed that designers Richard Pandav and Amit Vijaya as well as their team were very conscious of the textile waste generated during pattern making. “The team ensured textile scraps were collected, put in a bag and stored.

The studio had a room full of these bags. However, as fashion cycles are so busy, most designers do not have time to think of textile waste being a resource and working with it.”

Yet, Ashita started thinking of how textile waste could be repurposed. As part of her postgraduation project, she repurposed a bag of textile waste from Amrich. She sorted, washed and cut the discarded fabrics into strips, and then wove them into a textile with an attractive colour palette and lovely tactile feel.

Subsequently, guided by the faculty at Pearl Academy, she submitted the same with a business plan for setting up a B2B unit to turn textile waste into fabric (that could be used once again) as an entry for the James McGuire Business Plan Competition (2018).

It is an annual competition, held in the US, open to students from different fields and from different countries. Her submission won her the first place and a grant of $25,000 for setting up a business. It gave her the confidence that her idea had a future.