Loom to heirloom

Be it the organza Kanjeevaram or the khadi silk georgette, as Advaya from House Of Angadi enters its 10th year, K Radharaman, its founder, CEO and design head, looks back on how innovating the weave has reinvented the handwoven sari into a living tradition for the modern Indian woman.

- Shahnaz Siganporia

It’s not the grand old fashion houses or high-street success stories that K Radharaman, House Of Angadi’s CEO, design head and founder of the 10-year-old luxury design label Advaya, turns to for inspiration. Instead, he will, on one hand, look towards the work of Le Corbusier, the pioneer of modernist architecture. “When he started using reinforced concrete as a material medium, it transformed how buildings were constructed. It was a paradigm shift,” he explains. On the other, Radharaman will take you all the way back to the approximately 2,000-year-old Varadharaja Perumal Temple in Kanchipuram, the birthplace of the Kanjeevaram (“Textiles carry forward our culture,” he reminds) and then traces everything from the geometry of traditional motifs to the evolution of the handwoven pure silk and zari sari. But it’s between these ends of the spectrum that Radharaman has crafted his design vocabulary, which brings a collective tradition into the contemporary, by experimenting with the very construction of the handwoven sari to make it versatile yet beautiful and wearable.