Throughout my travels in India, understanding fashion through the lens of agriculture has been a central focus. With a fashion landscape that is nearly 60 per cent dominated by synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels like polyester, we forget that fashion has historically been a product of agriculture. And South Asia’s agrarian soul means we have a lexicon of natural fibres that make the case for regional textiles—from the rain-fed kala cotton in Gujarat and desi kapas in Punjab to phuti karpas in Bangladesh (which is spun into the valuable Dhaka muslin).
But while the environmental and economic pillars of sustainability have made headway in fashion conversations, cultural sustainability has remained at the fringes. Cultural sustainability underpins knowledge systems around a region’s biodiversity, its native fibres and its localised artisanal practices that go back generations and are important knowledge systems that have been preserved through intergenerational transfer. And in the frenzied search for silver-bullet solutions, we lose sight of the quieter existence of communities whose cultures have held symbiotic relationships with the land.
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