A confluence of craft: Sujata Keshavan’s Varana wants to dress the world in handmade Indian textiles

‘Top Notch’ is a fortnightly column where journalist and editor Namrata Zakaria introduces us to fashion’s elite and erudite club. *** Artisanal fashion, where the cloth as well as the clothing item is made by hand, has taken over the business and its language lately. Every label, big or small, is positioning itself as one that supports handloom fabric and weaver communities, or that uses only organic textile and is thus environment friendly. It is a very crowded, confusing, and even contrarian market. One young label has decided to step in, albeit belatedly, but to elevate the game. This is Varana, a luxury label that makes sumptuous contemporary clothes from India’s handlooms, and sells them abroad. Varana launched in London’s swishy Mayfair neighbourhood in 2017. It was started by Sujata Keshavan, who previously ran India’s leading graphic design firm Ray + Keshavan along with her partner and former boss Ram Ray. “Ray + Keshavan was one of the first companies to work on an international model. We worked on a company’s brand identity, its architecture and business alignments, not just the logo. When India liberalised, we took our brands to the world. This was before the advent of the internet,” Keshavan, 60, tells me over the phone from Bengaluru. Keshavan lives here with her writer and historian husband, Ramachandra Guha. Varana — co-founded by Ravi Prasad, the erstwhile chairman of the Himalaya Drug Company — has been featured in international giants like WWD and Financial Times already. It speaks of the “quiet joy” of refinement in design, combining the specialty of Indian handloom with the modern lines of neoteric clothing. It sources and produces its fabric in India, from Bengal and Jharkhand to Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu, and works with a team of international designers (Italian for fashion and Japanese for knitwear) to make clothes for a cosmopolitan woman. “We make everything in India and Nepal. Our fabric is made bespoke for us. We also use new weaves, some with weight, as the weaves you use for a sari cannot make a coat. Our office and atelier are in Bengaluru and we have two workshops, employing around 75 people in all,” Keshavan adds. [caption id=“attachment_9632801” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  (L) Jami block print shirt, (R) Khadi denim jacket; both by Varana[/caption] Keshavan’s move from graphic to textile was rather organic. She attributes it to her student years at Ahmedabad’s National Institute of Design, a temple for students of design, regardless of the medium. “I can make a building, a carpet as well as clothes. NID teaches you that design is really a thought process, whether for a highway or a safety pin,” she avers. Keshavan followed it up with an enviable MFA in graphic design from Yale, where she trained under legends like Paul Rand (the acclaimed art director who designed the logos of IBM and UPS) and Bradbury Thompson (he designed magazines like Business Week and Harvard Business Review). “Yale gave me tools to look at my work critically. And their faculty was fantastic. I was so lucky to be able to work with Rand. He was tough and brutal, but he created his field. He hated trends and believed in the timelessness of design. He was also averse to generic styles, he wanted tailormade solutions for every brand.” Keshavan believes fashion is a mix of architecture and graphic design. “We have jaw-dropping hand-skills, but modernism hasn’t come to the Indian handloom yet. We wanted to tap Indian skills, keep these techniques alive, but introduce them in a contemporary fashion. Not everyone wants to wear a sari. It’s a beautiful garment, but an easy to make flat cloth. I wanted to take our techniques to foreign shores. Varana is a high-end international product that shows the world what Indian textiles can do,” she enthuses. London came to be the perfect playground. “It really is the most international confluent city, as everyone goes through it. America is a bit more insular and caters to an American audience. At Varana, our first year saw customers from 55 countries,” Keshavan says. Varana is situated at Dover Street, with Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo for neighbours. “It’s in the same townhouse where Alexander McQueen had his store. We’ve redesigned it beautifully, it’s luminous like a spa.” Keshavan adds it took them almost two years to find a spot here. “We were a new brand from India and India is not known for luxury. We were competing with top Italian and French brands. But we were ambitious.” [caption id=“attachment_9632821” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  ‘Varana shows the world what Indian textiles can do,’ says Sujata Keshavan[/caption] Varana’s new collection shows statuesque khadi denim coats with white, wide-legged pants, sleek dresses in beautiful jami block prints, rich silks, and cashmere. Keshavan is committed to using dying crafts, like the jamdani, a loom-embroidered Bengal textile traditionally used for saris and identified by the UNESCO as a craft that needs preserving. Varana uses jamdani in creating white dresses with geometric patterns. Keshavan’s luxury enterprise is backed by investors who find her mission “compelling”. “We got badly hit by COVID, so we aren’t yet profitable. Our store was closed for most of last year, but we didn’t lay off anybody,” Keshavan says. There is the obvious argument that sustainable fashion is so expensive, it’s not for the average shopper. Varana’s clothes range from GBP 300 to 3,000. “I am dead against fast fashion. You buy cheap clothes and you discard them constantly. Their fabric is made of petroleum that isn’t biodegradable. But if you buy something that’s high quality, you end up using it for a very long time. If it lasts long, it saves you money,” she explains. Keshavan admits Varana still needs to scale up to truly impact livelihoods. But right now, it makes a wonderful case for what she calls “a soft power impact”.