Slowing the pace of fashion

Experiences of life organically make their way into an individual’s creative pursuits. In a director’s film, a writer’s tome, an architect’s structure and a fashion designer’s creation, past and present knot several threads to give the product a final shape. So, each time Karishma Shahani Sha, a Pune-based fashion designer, sits down to create a blueprint of her new collection, she begins with retrospection. “What I designed five years back complemented circumstances, people I met and places I travelled during that time.” In her debut collection at the London School of Fashion in 2011, she chose bright, dark colours over the usual palette of nude shades. “I would miss India and everything about it so much. The colour scheme helped me cope with homesickness.” The present is no different. The world around her finds a narrative in her label Ka Sha. And it is not just her immediate surroundings that cast an effect, even distant but relevant subjects do — like, environment. She recently won the coveted International Fashion Showcase Country Award at the London Fashion Week (along with four other Indian designers), where she presented her collection inspired from the Rabari Tribe in Kutch. Excerpts from an interview. I am inquisitive about how do designers dispose of the waste material at the workshop. I hope to begin a venture where in ‘used-less’ fabric and accessories will be collected and then sorted out to be used and experimented upon. This propels the idea of minimize wastage, and maximize sustainability. Ideally, it should begin with large corporate houses involved in mass production of clothes. My collection of 2014, Heart to Haat, entirely done with upcycled material, may be able to prove how waste can have a worth. See More: http://www.missydresses.ca/prom-dresses.html