For a simple stitch that evolved in the villages in Eastern India, kantha has travelled far — featuring in Hermès scarves and richly embellishing Sabyasachi Mukherjee ensembles. In today’s revivalist climate, the embroidery technique, born as a quilting method to reuse old saris, has designers intent on each motif being painstakingly done by hand. So it is surprising when a design studio turns traditions on its head.
Tiipoi’s Modern Kantha collection, to be launched later this month at the London Design Festival (LDF), has relieved the stitch of its decorativeness and pared it down to the basics. And, sacrilegiously to some, it has been mostly executed on quilting machines. But Spandana Gopal, founder of the London-based design studio, is glad of the intervention of modern machinery. “If a craftsman wants to evolve, it doesn’t mean you are discarding the tradition of the craft; it just means you are helping him take it further, and use his skills to do something else,” she says.
Keeping it simple
Tiipoi takes a common sense attitude to consumption, inspired by the Indian design ethos where nothing is wasted. “Innovation comes from a lack of something rather than an excess of it. The brand is a space for everyday products to tell their stories, not by being nostalgic but in a way that is fresh and progressive,” says Gopal, who worked at Sotheby’s and several West End galleries before launching her studio over three years ago.
For Modern Kantha, the 32-year-old collaborated with Copenhagen-based textile designers Martyna Golik and Sisse Witek, of Studio Witek Golik. “I met them at a design fair and really liked their approach to textiles — working with tactility and materiality,” she says, explaining that the collaboration stemmed from a desire to take a stereotype and transform it into something new. It’s interesting to note how traditional motifs like the sun and the tree of life have been done away with. Instead, Scandinavian minimalism has been brought to bear on kantha, with simple lines and crosses best highlighting how decoration follows functionality. “As we were working with an existing craft, we liked the idea of someone outside India, outside of that context, shedding fresh light on it,” adds Gopal.
Metalheads
Of course, there were challenges — as she will describe at a talk on Modern Kantha at the LDF — the least of which was getting the artisans to look at the craft in a different way. “They didn’t want to rejig their way of working, and we often got asked ‘why do I need to do this?’” she laughs, pointing out that now they want to do more. Another bump in the road: their initial idea of a scaled up kantha with different coloured threads overlapping. The design couldn’t be done by hand as the distance between stitches was too long. “We began experimenting on quilting machines and discovered a nice surprise: each long stitch was made up of many small stitches, like a kantha within a kantha,” shares Gopal, adding that each stitch is finally finished by hand.
Already brainstorming a new stainless steel collection, and a Tiipoi version of the South Indian coffee filter, Gopal says there are plans to bring the brand to India. “We also want to work with young designers coming out of India (many reach out to the studio over social media). We are planning to start mentoring programmes soon,” she concludes.
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