Ekà Arrives at Selvedge: One Label, Many Hands
We are delighted to welcome Ekà to the Selvedge Artisan Goods Shop. Ask Rina Singh what "Ekà" means and she will tell you: one. But ask her what she meant by it, and the answer runs deeper than translation. When she launched her label in 2011, she felt the creativity behind it was never entirely her own. It belonged to the weavers, block printers, and embroiderers she had gathered around her, a whole community folded into a single Sanskrit word. That word has shaped every collection since, made in Delhi under Singh's contemporary Indian label of the same name.
Above: An Ekà artisan hand stitches details onto cotton canvas. Below:The finished Finch Jacket.
Singh's route to textiles started long before fashion school. Raised in a family of agriculturists, her childhood summers in Saharanpur, rural North India, were shaped by weavers who arrived each year to set up khadi looms in the family home, and by her grandmother, who hand-knotted textile edges while yarn spun on a charkha nearby. That rhythm, of hands working cloth without hurry, has never quite left her.
Fashion training came later, at Wigan & Leigh College in Greater Manchester, followed by research work at NIFT Gandhinagar and a spell as head of women's wear design at Wills Lifestyle. It was this combination, craft memory and design training, that led her back to India's textile ecosystem and, eventually, to launching her own label.
Above: A block printing artisan placing details onto handwoven cotton khaki. Below: The finished Boris Dress
That community has grown from around 200 families to nearly 800, spread across West Bengal, Bhagalpur, Kota, and Varanasi. Handwoven cotton, linen, and silk pass through techniques including jamdani, extra weft weaving, and jacquard, alongside hand block printing and embroidery. Power looms are used sparingly, mostly for linen and wool blends that need extra strength.
Above: An Ekà artisan hand stitching details onto handwoven cotton khaki fabric. Below: The finished Boris Dress.
At the Gurgaon studio, design, weaving liaison, stitching, printing, and finishing all happen under one roof, work that has earned the facility certified green building status. Ekà's collections takes this further still, reworking archival fabrics into new shapes through over-dyeing and pattern reuse, extending the working life of cloth that has already proven its worth. Even the menswear and kidswear collections draw from this same pool of textiles, so nothing developed by the artisan network goes to waste.
Above: Dye samples in preparation on an Ekà studio table. Below: The Prion Jacket.
What runs through all of it is Singh's resistance to fashion cycles. Her silhouettes are fluid rather than fitted, designed to move across seasons and body types without needing to be reinvented each year. Garments built this way ask to be worn for years, returned to, and eventually passed on, carrying the hands that made them forward with them. It is an approach shaped as much by the Bengal weaving villages Singh works alongside as by the postcolonial aesthetics she absorbed growing up, a meeting point between inherited craft and contemporary design.
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Further Information:
Shop the label's pieces and see this philosophy in the cloth itself in the Selvedge Artisan Goods Shop.
Read more: Rina Singh spoke to Brinda Gill about craft, sustainability, and the philosophy behind Ekà in Clothes for Poets, Selvedge Issue 124, Rural.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Eká Basil dress (Detail), crafted from handwoven cotton khadi, with an abstract composition of hand-block printed motifs with blue tones, bringing depth and movement to the surface.
All further images as credited in captions.