DAY 5

The majority of today was spent at the studios of House of of Anita Dongre (HOAD). This started with talks from Aykeshia Sheti who has spent the past three years working at the fashion house. She spoke briefly through the origins of the company as well as some of the stakeholders, the most crucial mentioned by Aykeshia being the founders, the investors, and (surprisingly) the employees.

 

     Beginning with the history of HOAD. It was established in 1995, approximately 12 years ago, by Anita Dongre and her sister Meena Sehra. The duo started from scratch with Anita designing and making clothes not eh balcony of their home. They started by selling clothes to boutiques across the city and eventually grew to encompass 4 clothing brand, 280 employees, and over 700 retail shops. Sustainability has been hugely significant through the lifespan of HOAD. Anita Dongre is an active and proud vegan, the the building we were sat in had been designed to use as little resources as possible and even the food served in the cafeteria was vegetarian.

 

     The next part of the talk was on sustainable fashion. We were taught about the effect of microfibres, minuscule particles of synthetic and natural fabrics that get washed into oceans and seas and eaten by sea life. There are half a million tonnes of these fibres that enter the ocean each year. The definition of sustainability given by Aykeshia was one I knew well, “development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Some of the statistics that came up during this part of the talk were shocking and terrifying. The two that stick in my mind most clearly are 1) 50% of fast fashion produced is disposed in less than a year and 2) the GHG emissions caused by the fashion industry are currently at 1.2 billion tonnes a years. That last figure is higher than all international flights and American shipping emission combined.

 

    House of Anita Dongre tries to combat this within there own business in a number of ways. Firstly, there was a “green” consideration in the design and construction of the building. Windows are placed in order to maximise the amount of natural sunlight within the walls, there are vents to maximise cooling and reduce energy consumption, water and waste is recycled, they are passionate about animal welfare (leather is not used in any of their designs), and they have plans for wet waste composting. To celebrate earth day, 25,000 trees were planted in Rajasthan by HOAD funded by the Grow Trees Foundation which gave every customer 1 tree. Upon purchasing an item from the Anita Dongre collection, they were given a certificate to say that a tree had been planted in their name which they could google to see where their tree was planted. I thought this was a beautiful idea, especially as it was given as part of the wedding collection so worked almost like a wedding gift! We were also given more information regarding the Grassroots movement and how this aides in HOAD’s aims of sustainability. 

 

    After being introduced to block printing via an interactive workshop, we finally met Anita Dongre herself. She was an incredibly interesting lady who was so, incredibly enthusiastic to talk about her customers as well as her enthusiasm towards living a healthy and happy life. She spends Sundays with her families, participates in yoga and keeps to a strict timetable. She also talked us through her design process, saying that “from the not so best comes the best”. For greater context, she said that she would change designs set for the runway up to 10 days before they went, knowing that they would be the most successful despite being completed so last minute. Some inspiring words,  “do not change yourself… some people are their most creative after 11 or 12 at night” to a young student wanting to know how to ‘become’ a morning person.

 

     We left HOAD studios with bags full of scrap material to begin working on our projects with.