"Culture is constant evolution. It's not something that's stagnant or static."
The first design library Sanjana ever used belonged to a neighbourhood tailor. While clothes were being made for her as a child, she went through his books of necklines and sleeve options, combining them. "To me that was the whole idea of almost building garments as a jigsaw puzzle," she says. Before the puzzle there were the stories: her mother and her aunt having clothes made for festivals and those clothes becoming heirlooms. What stayed with her wasn't the garments so much as what had collected around them. "For me it was more of an emotional connection to clothes, through the idea of passing down traditions and celebrations." Both sides of her family come from eastern Bengal; her father was born in Britain. She was born in India, grew up across several countries, and came to London College of Fashion, where she has spent her degree on a question most brands would rather not raise. Her graduate collection showed this season at Fashion Scout's emerging designer showcase during London Fashion Week.
The industry has spent a decade on cultural appropriation and has mostly produced a stalemate. Sanjana's contribution is to turn the question around. "If you look at the way our parents dressed when we were kids, and compare them at our age, they wore traditional garments," she says. "A salwar kameez, a saree. Versus us, where we've adopted Western wear as something normal." Then the line that reframes the whole argument: "Why aren't people turning around and saying we're trying to cosplay, or trying to steal Western clothing? Why is it now seen as something that's normal?" She isn't arguing that appropriation doesn't exist. She's pointing at the asymmetry in who gets asked to justify what they wear. Indian designers show at Paris Fashion Week using French couture techniques and are applauded for it, she notes. The traffic runs in one direction and only one direction gets policed. Her worry is what the stalemate costs. "It deters a lot of people from taking chances at trying to actually understand a culture and celebrate it through their work, because in an age of images it's very easy to misunderstand someone's intent." And with attention spans where they are, nobody sits down with the six months of research behind the finished piece. So designers play it safe, and the industry stays where it is. "We're so stuck in the past because it is unsafe to evolve." Her graduate work is what the argument looks like when it's made out of cloth. The project takes kite flying as its subject chosen precisely because it isn't only South Asian. There are kite festivals in India, China, Japan and France. It's a hobby she describes as analogue and niche, which in the current climate is close to a disqualification. For the textile she went to paper. She researched how paper garments had actually been made and used: in China, armour coated in tung oil and layered until it could hold up in war; in Japan, robes worn by priests in the Edo period, treated with konnyaku to make them malleable and water-resistant. What she made from that research isn't a reproduction of either. She reversed bookbinding techniques to produce a paper textile that flexes, resists tearing and can be hand-washed in cold water. She describes her method as "careful deconstruction and synthesis" rather than copy-paste, which is the whole argument restated as process. You can work from other people's traditions without lifting them, if you're prepared to do the reading.
Sanjana has shown at London Fashion Week and still has no label, which by most editorial logic means there's nothing to write about. Given the state of the industry, she says she isn't comfortable launching one straight out of a degree, so for now she's applying for jobs and treating each rejection as data. What she wants eventually is unusual in its structure: an NGO funded by a for-profit, working to sustain artisan systems and transfer craft skills to the next generation, across countries rather than within one. The interest goes back at least to 2015, when she documented Banarasi weaving in Varanasi and jamdani in Phulia, comparing cooperative-run handloom operations with individual weavers, both competing against mechanised production inside India. What she took from it was a sense of how much human effort is buried in a garment and how thoroughly most of us have stopped noticing. She doesn't expect a mass awakening. "People always need to buy clothes. It's a dopamine supplier." What she wants to add to is smaller and more specific: an understanding of "the significance of handmade now in the age of flat pack and IKEA." She suspects others are working on the same thing and simply can't find each other. "There's no such thing as being a founding father for anything nowadays. It's a case of trying to find a collective that already exists. People might be scattered. You just have to find each other." She's blunt about why that's hard. Creative work carries a piece of the person who made it, which makes people protective, and protectiveness makes collectives difficult. "A large part of being a creative is taking a part of us and throwing it out in the world and saying, this is something I've made and this is why it's relevant to me." Asked whether the isolation is worse for designers from the Global South, she says no and makes a point that cuts against the expected answer. Communities from the Global South, she argues, are better at community, not worse. "I've always seen people finding other people. Be it Holi, be it Diwali, we always find a way to build that community." The problem is the fragmentation everywhere else and not necessarily her region.
Sanjana Ghosh, Designer
