Anyone’s Heritage? Indian Fashion Design’s Relationships with Craft between Local Guardianship and Valorization of Global Fashion

Abstract

The paper contributes to our understanding of current global Indian fashion engagements with textiles craft by studying the work of Manish Arora and Rahul Mishra. The research starts by analysing what both designers say about their use of crafts; it then considers their collections with special regard to sites of craft production before gauging the international fashion press’s perceptions of craft in Indian fashion. The paper finds that Arora and Mishra assign variable degrees of agency to the craftspeople they work with, and that their divergent modes of employing artisans are as strongly influenced by their personal relationships with Indian textiles as by their individual approaches to fashion. The findings are then reflected against recent calls from within Europe for fashion’s return to textiles heritage, and while we suggest that fashion design capabilities beyond the global north tend to be underestimated in this context, we propose that interactions between fashion and craft in the global south can indeed offer interesting new working models for fashion cultures even where these have no hinterland of living textiles heritage.