DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT
Her keen interest in textiles had Riddhi
conceptualising a range—designing fabrics and
then moving onto finished garments. During
her visits to artisans in Kutch, she would find
bundles of entangled threads that were beautifully
coloured and had a lovely texture, only to realise
later that those were yarns discarded by dyers,
once the resist-dyeing process was complete.
She took these threads and sandwiched them
between layers of sheer fabric to obtain a
wonderful quilted textile. Taking the technique
further, Riddhi placed these threads between
water-soluble papers, and quilted and washed
them to obtain an unusual fabric of meshed
threads when the papers dissolved away. These
two techniques became the bedrock of her
ongoing collection ‘Re’-, which stems from
her commitment to upcycling. (Riddhi is
presently working on a collection of upcycled
‘Re-wear’ jackets.)
TRAVERSING TEXTILES
Riddhi’s project at NIFT stirred her interest in
textiles, and after spending a year at her mother’s
studio post the course, she enrolled in a course
in textile design at the National Institute of Design
(NID), Ahmedabad. “I found the course extremely
inspiring and enriching. I learnt about the
technicalities of textiles, which changed the way
I looked at them,” she says. During the course,
Riddhi studied everything from weaving and
resist-dyeing to printing. She learnt several
ral ways
of doing shibori, the Japanese technique e
of resist-dyeing, by folding, gathering,
crumpling, twisting, plucking, and tying a
fabric with different elements like thread
and clamps, and dyeing it.
RIDDHI WORKS
TOWARDS CREATING
A DISTINCTLY ABSTRACT,
VISUAL LANGUAGE.
to “go beyond what she had seen, and find her
own language” as she loved both the process
of dyeing and its results. Crafting shibori textiles
using natural and azo-free dyes, Riddhi works
towards creating
a distinctly abstract, visual language out of a
desire to experiment and lend traditional crafts a
new perspective.
“What I particularly love about shibori is that
it gives rise to beautiful patterns and that one
can see results in an instant and also continue
to create more designs for weeks. Plus, I like
the math behind resist-dyeing. I think, plan, and
SPECIALISING IN SHIBORI
Learning and practising different
techniques of shibori helped Riddhi
APPAREL
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