Ep 8.Jiwya's 19,000 km journey across India to understand what’s broken in fashion & how to fix it

Description

Behind every “sustainable” label is a supply chain and most of those still look worryingly similar to fast fashion. In this episode of Custodians of Crafts, Rini Bankhwal speaks with Jiwya’s founders, textile scientists Aishwarya Lahariya and Adhiraj Shinde, who decided that tweaking fashion at the edges was not enough. They walked away from safe careers, came back to India, and started again at the loom, at the farm, and in the dye vat to ask a basic but radical question: what would fashion look like if it were designed for soil, not just for runways?​​ To find answers, they travelled 19,000 kilometres across 19 Indian states, listening to over 150 artisans talk about broken markets, disappearing craft lineages, and the everyday maths of survival. Out of those conversations emerged Jiwya: a fully plant-based, soil-to-soil label that insists on natural fibres and dyes, pays for time and skill rather than volume, and co-builds collections with the 33,000 craftspeople now woven into its orbit.​ This is not a neat success story; it is a field report from inside a live experiment.They also unpack what it means to truly decolonise fashion through Indian crafts as a shift in who holds knowledge, who takes risk, and who gets to define value in the clothes we wear. 00:00 Introduction to Sustainability in Fashion 02:46 The Journey of Jiwya: From Education to Entrepreneurship 04:23 Exploring the Artisan Connection: A Unique Business Model 10:01 Navigating Sustainable Consumption in India 17:50 Designing for the Future: Merging Tradition with Modernity 23:58 Artisan Collaboration and Innovation 26:38 Challenges of Scaling Artisan Fashion 29:56 Decolonising Fashion: A Cultural Movement 31:48 Reviving Traditional Practices 38:14 International Ambitions and Market Understanding -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jiwya Website: https://www.jiwya.com/?srsltid=AfmBOop_68C5NNSaUZiK1CGF4NFTIpuvnVqJrhAXQNvVIYDfN7EKoBEX All images copyright: