Anyone’s Heritage? : Indian Fashion Design’s Relationships with Craft between Local Guardianship and Valorization of Global Fashion
- Submitting institution
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Heriot-Watt University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32458586
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/17569370.2020.1769361
- Title of journal
- Fashion Practice
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 264
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1756-9370
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The international Journal of Fashion Practice (FP) invited international original research contributions to its special issue on Fashion Practice in India (2018). This paper builds on the author’s research expertise in the heritage and innovation of craft and design engagements; however, in contrast to earlier research its focus is on the fashion designers -- on their self-publicised, professionally received and actual relationship to craft communities, product and heritage. The research combines findings from a personal interview with designer Manish Arora and data from a rare field visit to his production premises in India. It compares personal statements with observed practice, resultant material culture and its international reception, and thus contributes a multifaceted view on a complex, deeply cultural and highly personal approach to heritage and innovation. Findings from this first phase of the research were presented and published at the Global Fashion Conference (Stockholm, 2016) and an augmented version was proposed to the FP India issue. During a multistage peer review process the research was widened to include comparative data on Rahul Mishra.
By analysing what both designers say about their use of crafts, and by comparing their collections with special regard to sites of craft production before gauging respective editorial perceptions, the paper finds that Arora and Mishra assign variable degrees of agency to craftspeople, and appear guided as much by their personal relationships with Indian textiles as by their individual approaches to fashion. The findings are reflected against current literature and recent calls for fashion’s return to heritage, and while it suggests that fashion design capabilities beyond the global north tend to be underestimated in this context, the output proposes that interactions between fashion and craft in the global south can offer new working models for fashion cultures even where these have no hinterland of living textiles heritage.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
