Why I’m Building Kriti Magazine: Documenting the Indian Textile Industry Beyond the Scroll
- Sumana Mukherjee
- 13 hours ago
- 3 min read
Why am I building Kriti Magazine? To document crafts and practices in the Indian Textile Industry. Why does it matter? Think about what you have been scrolling through for the past 12 months — well-known European fashion houses reinterpreting Indian crafts without citing the original creators, followed by a storm of carousels that explain centuries of craft evolution in 11 slides to shine light on the original creators (without actual credits to the creators). What do you remember from those? Ajrakh is the block print on clothes, Jamdani is the magic from Bengal, Kanjivaram and Banarasi are the sparkling components in the wedding trousseau, and it takes gallons of water to make one t-shirt.
Confused with so much snippety content, you walk to the nearest ultra-fast fashion store and buy 3 tshirts for ₹999! All efforts at environmental sustainability, ethical fashion and craft preservation gone down the drain. It's like getting overwhelmed by the massive growth in tech and concluding that laptops are for emails, smartphones are for pictures, AI is for writing and our lives are being guided by satellites over our heads.
This is where detailed and nuanced documentation plays its main character role. And this is exactly why magazines, blogs and newsletters are making a comeback. Believe it or not, people who take the time to create detailed written content are finding their readers in this dawn of post free-content-avalanche era of the internet. Even more surprising is the fact that people are paying to read these periodicals not for those weekly articles, but for the amount of work that goes into curating the content.
Say you are not a fashion designer, or a textile researcher, why should reading Kriti matter to you? Think of the demand for interdisciplinary skills at your workplace. Would it really hurt to read about people are building businesses at the intersection of craft and commerce? Mind you, the stories in our magazine are about people and brands who are building real-world products that humans are buying with money. We don't have stories on brands that value craft so much that they end up creating 1 Sari in 1 year (yes they exist). That is great dedication to craft, but not a sustainable business model. It won't feed the brand owner for long, much less take care of the artisans whom they are trying to empower. We also don't have stories on fashion brands who claim their products are sustainable just because their fabric is exotic (so what their products are shipped in 15 hour flights and not paying the garment workers in factories). And the final nail in the coffin — we do not write about celebrity relationship issues. Their lives, their rules.
Instead, we are actively publishing stories on brands that are balancing sustainability as much as possible across the supply chain. The ones who are trying to optimise what's on their plate, rather than running for vanity credits that will prove to the world they are sustainable. We are highlighting people who are taking the time to understand the impact of their work on artisanal communities whose work seem to fill everyone in the world with pride these days. For at the helm of it is me, a thorough tech business minded person trying to understand the value of Indian crafts and handlooms and how they are relevant to current practices in circular and organic design. So, if nothing else, reading Kriti will help you build reliable neural connections, just like it does for me. You can take my word for it.
Thanks for reading, Sumana (Editor Kriti Magazine, Founder Sustainaverse).
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