Kantha Art: Meaningful Recycling
Everyone knows the 3 R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
But have you ever thought about how your clothing might embody this sentiment?
No fashion approach does this better than Kantha. Kantha uses varied fabrics and weaves them together with fine, intricate stitching. This creates a one-of-a-kind piece that can never be duplicated. The beautiful, hand-crafted pieces that result from the fine stitching of Kantha are laden with excellence and high-quality.
It is in this way that Kantha steps away from the methods of fast, cheap style. Fashion is a highly pollutive industry, pays low wages, pollutes local environments, and overuses synthetic materials, fertilizers, and chemicals, resulting in cheap, short-lived garments. By recovering fabric scraps, and repurposing them for unique clothing, Kantha art avoids the pollutive activities associated with new fabric production and creates timeless, long-lasting garments. Environmental stewardship is woven into the Kantha approach, in its beautiful repurposing of discarded cloth, through careful, attentive, loving hand-stitching that makes the unloved lovable; the useless usable.
Kantha art is a meaningful way to recycle. Not only does it recover discarded fabrics and put them to good use, but it also recycles generations of cultural knowledge passed on to the Kantha artisan.
In this way, Kantha recovers tradition. By recycling knowledge from mother to daughter, this folk art has survived through the ages. Like the separate cloths in Kantha art, generations have been stitched together to continue this elegant art of embroidering stories and memories into each Kantha piece. When we see Kantha, we see history. When we wear it, we wrap ourselves in the memories of generations.
Kantha is a functional art form of recycling. It cannot be mass-produced, recovers fabric scraps, and rejuvenates a centuries-old Indian cultural craft that stitches art, recycling, and craft together into fine, luxurious, unique pieces of clothing.
To see some of these incredible, hand-woven jackets click here
