Smriti "Simmi" D. Isaac

With Oprah’s website recently recommending an IOU scarf as a ‘gift to give’, our Tartan-of-the-East might just have a new, haute career.

By Chryselle D’Silva Dias

“Lungis are what a gali ka goonda wears,” chides a user on an online forum to a friend who is extolling its virtues. Although it is a staple of men (and often, women) in Southern India, the lungi has a somewhat unsavoury reputation elsewhere. Considered too humble to be chic, there are few trendy takers for this cheerful checked garment.

There are exceptions, of course.

They have shown up on the catwalk in India. Wendell Rodricks and Satya Paul have both showcased bright, flowing lungis. Rodricks has a special affinity for the garment and uses them in all his collections. “I wear a lungi daily,” he says.

Fashion blogger Mitali Parekh loves her lungis and often uses them as a wrap over shorts. “The lungi was very fashionable in the 70s and my mother and father both wore it with ‘guru shirts’,” says Parekh. She gets her stash from little shops in Dadar and Kala Chowki that still sell vintage block prints.

Often made from silk, sheer cotton or linen in saturated hues, designer lungis make for ideal resort wear, a replacement for the sarong. But the traditional checked lungi has probably never made it to Page 3.

All that might just change if the recently launched IOUProject goes viral.

Madrid-based fashion designer and entrepreneur Kavita Parmar and her ‘The IOU Project‘, are buying reams of classic Madras Checks from weavers in Tamil Nadu through Co-optex, and converting them into high-end, beautifully tailored clothing. Using master tailors in Europe, the simple handloom cloth transforms into elegant jackets, shirts, skirts and classic dresses. These are then sold exclusively online using social media.

The IOU strategy is unique, as are each of its garments. Every outfit has a story, a name attached to it, and is “traceable”. A special QR (Quick Response) Code sewn into each garment allows you to identify the weaver who created the cloth and the tailor who put it together. Buyers can upload their own photos as well, to complete the chain. A look at the IOU website allows you to see ‘real’ users wearing the garments.  That gives the weaver a sense of pride in his work as he sees people all over the world wearing his hand-woven cloth.  That’s a key link that is missing in traditional industries overtaken by middlemen.

 

Madrid-based The IOU Project is buying reams of classic Madras Checks from weavers in Tamil Nadu and converting them into high-end clothing. rinproject/Flickr

Parmar has two other fashion brands to her credit – Maison Raasta and Suzie Wong. She has used the Madras Check/Lungi patterns in her designs for Raasta collections before. “Everyone owns a Madras Check in some shape or form,” she says. “But most of the so-called Madras in nearly all shops around the world doesn’t come from Madras; in fact most of it is not even made in India.”

Realising that the weavers in India don’t get any real benefit from the widely used traditional patterns, Parmar signed up Co-optex to supply 30,000 lungis by the end of September. Around 246 weavers working in nine co-operative societies in Kurijipadi are involved in the project and have all agreed to work to “a higher standard” for higher pay.

Each loom can create an eight-meter fabric at a time. One lungi is just two meters of this length. IOU takes the entire eight-meter and comes up with a shirt, a skirt, a pair of trousers or a dress from that cloth. Because each length is unique (traditionally, the weaver decides the pattern and colours of each length for himself), no two garments are the same.

While it might be too soon to expect a rush of people wearing the lungi, the checks are certainly going places.  And hopefully they will make a difference where it really counts. The above-average pay rates (and other benefits, including a fund for the village) may encourage the young people of the villages to rethink their factory jobs and return to the loom instead.

In Goa, Wendell Rodricks’ revival of the Kunbi sari has been a decade-long labour of love and hard work. Rodricks took this almost-extinct garment of the marginalised Kunbi tribe and transformed it into soft drapes of muted cotton. The Kunbi weave shows up in Rodricks’ kurtas, trousers, elegant tops and of course, saris that are stunning in their simplicity. Rodricks wants to empower Kunbi women to return to weaving their distinctive saris and be proud of their roots. This, he hopes, will be his lasting legacy.

For Kavita Parmar, the journey down this road is just beginning. The positive response to the clothes has been encouraging. And with Oprah’s website recently recommending an IOU scarf as a ‘gift to give’, our Tartan-of-the-East might just have a new, haute career.

via firstpost.com

Virginia Heffernan on digital and pop culture.

Happy birthday!! With two exclamation points, as we do it on Facebook. It’s your birthday today, right? I send you many happy returns — and a wish that you are, if only for today, among the 750 million active Facebook users.

Yes, Facebook can be capricious and tyrannical and tedious, but the leviathan social network is the best thing that’s ever happened to birthdays.

A seemingly small but cleverly gracious component of the digital universe.

Come to think of it, how did we manage birthdays, those nettlesome sources of narcissism and guilt, before the Internet? I’m trying to remember. It seems there was always a scale problem. Birthdays in analog times were over-celebrated (as for children or the powerful), or they were neglected (as for everyone else). It stung when people forgot your birthday, sure, but the shame of caring or, worse yet, reminding people to care about your birthday stung much more deeply.

I’m now convinced that if you’d asked me what I wanted for any birthday, or indeed for anyone else’s birthday, before 2007, when I joined Facebook, I would have said I wanted a mechanism that made it easy for people to wish one another happy birthday. In my fantasy app, celebrators of birthdays wouldn’t have to be seen craving attention, but they’d still have their presence on this third rock from the sun gratefully and annually acknowledged. At the same time, acquaintances and intimates wouldn’t have to go to heroic mnemonic lengths, or hire secretaries, to keep calendars marked and birthday greetings in the mail.

Facebook’s birthday feature is a seemingly small but cleverly gracious component of the digital universe. When you join the massive site, you enter in the date you were born, leaving off the year if you choose. You don’t do this because you are a birthday-fanatic who expects weeks of flowers. You do it because — well, you’re also entering in where you went to college and whether you like “Rescue Me,” so why not your birthday?

And then the day arrives. Alerted to its imminence, and then to its arrival, Facebook friends have been conspicuously urged on their own pages this way: “Joe Jones. It’s his birthday. Say happy birthday.” To honor this command, they need only click “Say happy birthday” and type a few characters. It takes effort and misanthropy to refuse.

“Happy birthday!!” a friend can type with the exact degree of effort — no less and no more — that one human honestly feels like mustering once a year on behalf of the existence of another human to whom she is not related or similarly psychically indebted.

The keystrokes of a birthday greeting cost the person who enters them next to nothing, a penny in exertion and symbolic labor. But the Facebook greeting still carries something like eye contact, recognition and a smile — humanness. Which is, paradoxically, what people most fervently traffic in the shimmering cyberworld of the Internet.

At this moment, when so many of the world’s markets seem haywire — with the logic of supply, demand, pricing and debt broken — seeing an economy that works as well as Facebook’s birthday feature gives a flash of hope.

But not everyone sees Facebook’s birthday-nomics as the creation of efficiencies in a marketplace of kindness and humanity. In Slate, not long ago, David Plotz decided that Facebook birthday greetings were fakery itself, and an attempt by people who offer them “to build social capital — undeserved social capital.” What was so obnoxious and opportunistic about the greetings? Plotz had an answer: “It’s all too obvious that the greetings are programmed, canned, and impersonal, prompted by a Facebook alert.”

Hmm. Fascinating — and enlightening about how different reality and humanness are defined in virtual space. To Plotz, a birthday greeting is only meaningful — only real — if the person offering it uses analog memory aids. (Presumably, a birthday greeting inspired by a calendar, a good brain for dates or a nagging spouse would not be fraudulent.) “It’s one thing to remember your friend’s birthday because you took him out a decade ago for his drunken 21^st birthday debauch,” Plotz writes, applauding a path to memory that requires 10 years and possibly the psychic penetration of a boozy blackout. “It’s much lamer to ‘remember’ your friend’s birthday because Facebook told you to.”

For a birthday greeting to really sing with authenticity, then, the memory-retrieval behind it should have required some genuine dredging — battle with the limits of neurobiology. Plotz, for his birthday, wants to see a little sacrifice from his friends. By contrast, what makes the Facebook birthday alerts insidious to him is what makes them benign to me: that the alerts work, don’t disproportionately favor calendrical geniuses or drunks having flashbacks, and never fail. Also, I like that they engender actual greetings.

That’s right: So far, bots and spammers don’t seem to be among the well-wishers on a Facebook birthday. Real humans send the greetings. And they’re customized. The majority of Facebook birthday greeters use exclamation points; many add earnest hopes for well-being and prosperity; some come up with real witticisms. To me, on my birthday, these well-wishes invariably seem like a surfeit of good will beamed at me from the universe itself.

Facebook’s greeting says to a human, “I was told your name, and told it was your birthday, and I didn’t do nothing.”

Sometimes, like on your birthday, that’s a perfect gift.

via opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com