Features

Not always do big-ticket events or headline-grabbing incidents dominate the developments over a calendar year; more so in the textiles and apparel industry where the throwing of a stone into a pond creates ripples years later. On the other hand, quite often in fact, there are silent developments that tend to have a bigger long-term impact on the fashion scheme of things. The year gone by was one such phase, with many key developments of 2017 not causing a stir. # 1) Digitalise, or be done with...

Sometime in the early 1990s, a well-known designer in Delhi spotted a person at an upmarket shopping complex wearing a stunning outfit in cream and red. But when he took a closer look he was in for a shock, for the woman was wearing one of his own designs. Worse still, the design had not yet left his studio. The designer, obviously, queried her and discovered that she had purchased it from an upscale boutique. This creation was in a different shade, but the material was ordinary. The designer...

About a year and a half back, the showcasing of an innovation at the Shanghai Fashion Week took the world by storm. The surprise and awe with which the technology was received both there at the event as well as later in the fashion media was evident in one aspect: that the fashion world had not seen it coming. The tech world, on the other hand, had only been waiting for it to finally happen. Independent label Babyghost was showcasing its 2017 Spring and Summer collection at Shanghai in April...

Scouring through old journals and magazines can throw up fascinating snippets about the past, and many of those can catch you by surprise, and set you thinking all over again. Scraping websites for cotton alternatives, at some point, can well take one to a particular report from the proceedings of a textiles-related event would make for interesting reading. It goes thus: Speaking at the annual meeting of the Bradford Dyers’ Association, recently, Sir Milton Sharp, observed that the deplorable...

Many segments of the textiles and apparel industry are not as dynamic or happening as certain others. Also, many sectors remain under the radar, far away from public gaze, simply because of the back-end nature of their work. The testing, inspection and certification (TIC) segment is one such segment that has been increasingly gaining significance in a very trying and demanding world. The demand for quality, and therefore standards and benchmarks, are increasingly becoming strident and...

An uneasy calm prevails over the usually-bustling textiles hub of Surat. The phrase "uneasy calm" of course could well be a worn-out cliché; but both the unease and the calm here are stark and for real. The calm exists because the strike and simultaneous protests have been called off in the hope that the Goods and Services Tax Council will look into the grievances of the city's traders, as well their cousins elsewhere. The unease, on the other hand, self-perpetuates because the core issues that...

There are few industries that are under pressure both from within and outside to pull up its socks than the textiles-apparel-fashion industry. And there are few agricultural crops/products that that have so much of an overarching bearing on countless industries down a longwinding supply chain as cotton; and in this case, it would be the same textiles-apparel-fashion industry. There have been enough damning reports—some contentious, others not—about the way cotton is cultivated and the adverse...

Even as recently as in 2010, when a premier research institution was working on the scope of sports retail in India, the idea of a website that meticulously and assiduously tracks running events in the country would have seemed a tad outlandish. That June, a working paper from the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) titled ‘Sports Retailing in India: Opportunities, Constraints and Way Forward’ had investigated select sports segments in India, but had...

Sometime in January this year, a group of 20-odd people had gathered at a textiles facility in the Peenya Industrial Area on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The occasion was the inauguration of two state-of-the-art printing machines that Fashion Matrix Overseas (FMO) had just installed. The sleek new machines had been purchased from Israel-based industry giant Kornit Digital, and officials of both Kornit and FMO were visibly animated about the event, and what it would to their respective businesses...

About four years ago, the Karnataka government was accused of diverting 10,000 acres of land for various defence, scientific and developmental projects. The merits or demerits of the land-grab allegations aside, there was a rather interesting and disconcerting element that kept cropping up—that the state government thought there was no issue of note with the land concerned, for it was perceived to be a virtual wasteland, a swathe of unusable land that was now being put to good use. Therein lies...