Why Workshops?

I never really understood the idea of workshops while growing up in India. It was only when I moved to Milan in 2018–2019 to study fashion that I realised how deeply people valued them. Everyone around me was constantly attending workshops, exploring materials, researching processes, and learning outside classrooms. It felt exciting in a way I had never experienced before.

At the time, I was presenting a Fashion project to one of my professors and mentors in college. I had brought what I thought were “minimal” textiles to the table, but she looked at me and said something that completely stayed with me:

“It’s interesting that you’re Indian because I’ve never seen such boring textiles from someone from that country.”

I was honestly offended for two seconds.

But then she asked me something that changed my life:

“Why aren’t you working with plant dyes?”

The funny thing is that Agrima and I had already experimented with natural dyeing once during our undergrad in India around 2017. We had seen some probably-fake Pinterest image showing crazy colours made from beetroot and mangoes and thought, “Let’s try this witchcraft.” We dyed a few swatches, thought it was cool for a day, and completely forgot about it.

That’s the thing about India sometimes — it’s such an overstimulated country that nothing surprises you anymore. Everything feels possible all the time, so you don’t always realise the value of what exists around you.

But living in Milan changed that for me.

Being away from India made me understand craft differently. Europe was beautiful, but life there felt complex and exhausting in ways I had never experienced before. In India, we grow up surrounded by incredible material culture, labour, colour, textiles, processes, and accessibility without even realising how rare that is.

So I began researching natural dyeing seriously. I bought books, spent hours studying, and slowly fell in love with the depth of the practice. What fascinated me most was that natural dyeing was not just Indian — it was universal. Every culture had its own relationship with colour, plants, fibres, rituals, and textiles.

And my professors in Milan taught us something I still carry with me:
not to approach craft from the perspective of “beautiful” or “ugly,” “good” or “bad.” It was a way of living. A way of observing the world.

As a fashion designer, I realised this was the life I wanted to choose for myself.

Eventually, during the pandemic, Agrima and I returned to India while still enrolled in college remotely. Suddenly we had time — a strange amount of time — and we started sharing everything we had learned.

That became the beginning of our workshops.

Our first workshop happened online in April 2020 with just two participants. I still remember placing a laptop on the bed, carrying it into the kitchen, and trying to explain natural dyeing through a screen while figuring everything out in real time.

And somehow, that tiny workshop became the beginning of something incredibly important to us.

Since then, workshops have become one of the most meaningful parts of our practice. They allow people to explore like children again — to experiment, observe, fail, research, and reconnect with materials in a slower and more thoughtful way.

More than anything, we do this because we genuinely love the practice. We want more people to engage with these crafts, research them, preserve them, and push them forward in contemporary ways. We don’t want these traditions to disappear quietly.

So these workshops are not just classes to us.
They are an extension of how we live, learn, and understand the world through colour, textiles, and process.