A weaver counting threads with a needle instead of a ruler. No pattern book, no measuring tape, just years of practice compressed into the movement of a hand across a loom. This is how Santanu Das describes the makers behind Maku, the Kolkata studio he founded in 2011, and it tells you almost everything about why his clothes look the way they do. We're delighted to welcome Maku as the newest addition to the Selvedge Artisan Goods shop.
Das didn't train as a fashion designer. He studied at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, won the Valcellina Award for an installation built from old jamdani saris and abla mirror work, then took a design job in New York before turning back towards Kolkata and the handloom traditions he'd grown up around. His mother's white Tangail sarees stayed with him. So did a conviction that industrialisation had, in his words, killed the art of weaving. Maku became his answer: a label built on dialogue with rural weavers rather than instructions handed down to them.
That dialogue shapes everything Maku makes. Das designs the warp, then travels to the villages himself, sitting beside the weaver as the cloth takes form. Nobody knows what the finished fabric will look like when they start. Jamdani, the technique at the centre of the studio's work, is an extra weft inlay brocade on fine muslin, developed during the Mughal era to bring embroidery-like richness onto a simple loom. Weavers build motifs by counting threads rather than tracing a design, working out proportion and rhythm as they go. Das calls it a language in its own right, one that risks disappearing within a generation if nobody troubles to learn it properly.
The studio's early years were defined by a single colour: indigo, drawn from Bengal's long relationship with the dye and prized by Das for the way it ages and shifts, from pale powder blue through to near black, much like a living thing. Sarees, khadi and jamdani scarves carried that restraint into a global market, finding particular favour in Japan. The palette has since opened out. After many years working almost exclusively in white and indigo, Das and his team began developing seasonal swatches by the hundred, arriving at eighteen new shades and tints, alongside a first foray into Kutch chain-stitch embroidery drawn from Rabari craft traditions.
Behind the finished garments sit 100 weavers working from village pit looms, and 70 artisans and staff in the Kolkata studio, some of whom have been with Maku for a decade. Das is candid about what's at stake if handloom skills keep giving way to power looms built for speed rather than intricacy. Slowness, in Maku's world, isn't a limitation. It's the whole point.
. . .
Further Information:
Garments from the Maku collection are now available in the Selvedge Artisan Goods Shop
. . .
Image Credits:
All images courtesy of Maku.