texfash

For generations, master artisans across India and the Global South supplied luxury markets while their names stayed hidden behind export houses, intermediaries and non-disclosure agreements. A new incubator asks whether that labour can carry its own name and command luxury value. Susan Walker, whose nonprofit Ibu operates from the American city of Charleston, explains how visibility and price might converge.

As slow fashion turns handmade cloth into a selling point, the artisans behind Ikat and Kantha have gained visibility without a matching rise in pay or security. The imbalance raises a pointed question about who profits from the story of craft. Megha Agarwal, founder of Studio Maeve, weighs whether artisan recognition delivers genuine dignity or borrowed branding.

For generations, the women who hand-paint Kalamkari cloth in southern Andhra Pradesh sold their labour without their names attached to it. Anita Reddy, a social worker who founded the artisan collective DWARAKA, set out to change that by placing control of both the making and the pricing with the women themselves, from the first outline to the final price.

Indian knitwear remains largely seasonal, confined to winter essentials and mass production with limited design ambition. Saloni Jain, founder and designer of her eponymous label Saloni Jain, approaches knit as a creative discipline grounded in fibre science and construction logic. Her work in cotton, linen and lyocell reframes knitwear as a year-round design medium for the Indian market.

Hemp has long promised more than it has delivered in commercial textile markets. Supply inconsistency, cost uncertainty, and the absence of viable blend systems kept it at the margins. A US company now has an India entity, local inventory, and identified business cases in hand. Tim Almond, Founder, Heartland USA, and Amey Padma, Head – India Business, explain the model.

Fragmented pilot projects have long defined regenerative agriculture efforts in Pakistan's cotton sector, but mounting climate and market pressures are exposing the limits of that approach. Drawing on a recent industry roundtable, Abou Bakar, Country Representative – Pakistan, CottonConnect, explains what a coordinated national framework would look like, and why farmer incentives and traceability now sit at the centre of that conversation.

Cotton is the raw material on which India's textile and apparel export ambitions rest, and for the second time in a year the government has moved to lower its cost for processors by removing import duties. The measure runs until late October this year. What it does not do is resolve the underlying tension between farm-income protection and industrial competitiveness that has made the duty a recurring site of policy conflict.

Conventional apparel was built around a body that could button, reach, grip and stand without assistance. For the large share of the population whose bodies did not meet those assumptions, clothing was a problem managed through specialist channels or post-market alteration. Retailers including Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Zara, Marks & Spencer and Kohl's are now integrating adaptive lines into standard stores, reflecting commercial recognition of a market failure the industry long declined to name.

The just-launched Padma Doree initiative has been positioned as more than a fabric line, with Eri silk and Chanderi brought together inside a premium craft category that speaks of sustainability and artisan value, yet the claim will remain incomplete until the initiative shows who earns, who decides, who carries risk and whether the premium travels back to the loom through durable market demand.

The global apparel industry's sustainability reporting expanded substantially in the years following the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster. A new study examining 322 reports from 69 companies over seven years jhas found that the expansion was real and the accountability was not. Environmental content consistently outranked labour conditions, and the sector's reporting tone became progressively more optimistic regardless of what was happening in the supply chains those reports described.