Upon visiting my village in Gujarat, India, I was filled with awe as I watched my elders effortlessly wear the Lungi. There was an art in the way they tucked, pleated, wrapped, tied and manipulated the 2.25m of soft indian cotton around their waists. Woven in bold chequered designs, the lungi was everywhere; in the fields, markets, streets and in our homes. It embodied ease, practicality and comfort while symbolising a deep connection to rural lifestyle and Indian identity. But as I looked closer, I noticed a shift. My cousins and younger village boys turned away from this humble cloth, choosing westernised ‘cooler’ clothing instead. Tradition was slipping quietly into the background, dismissed as outdated and unfashionable, a parallel shared in the western world where heritage attire carries stigma and is left in the shadows of assimilation. Born from this tension, Lungiwala is my way of reviving the lungi, and reclaiming what diaspora often makes fragile; the ability to wear identity with confidence. 

Reflecting on my own relationship with cultural clothing as an immigrant, my research journey started with a question: why doesn’t cultural dress feel empowering to wear? I found my answers in Fashion & Anti-Fashion by Ted Polhemus and guidance through the writings of Emma Tarlo in ‘Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India’. I learnt how deeply colonialism impacted indigenous dress, textile and craft systems. The colonial era imposed a new value structure that not only degraded our practices but influenced a long term sense of cultural inferiority onto our communities. They broke our looms, stole our lands and laughed at our way of life. That’s when I understood; our clothing was never the issue, it was the way we were taught to view heritage with subordinacy. Deep down I already knew what I had to do, I felt responsible to create garments that empower my people and found my way back to the noble lungi. 

Yet when I began working with lungi, I felt both excitement and hesitation. I carried a quiet fear of how my own community would react, whether reinterpreting the Lungi would be seen as disrespectful or misunderstood. This was translated through my initial designs that lacked risk taking and didn’t fully encapsulate my concept. Unhappy with this direction, I turned to my father and his memories of growing up in the village with his father and brother all wrapped in Lungi. Through long conversations with him, I learnt not just about the physical garment but also about its role in his life, its comfort, and its symbolism of working-class resilience. By embedding my family’s voices and lived experiences into my process, I was able to design with respect, not appropriation, and allow the cloth to carry its own dignity and legacy into contemporary fashion. 

Through this approach, I explore how design can hold memory, not only as garments but as living narratives. Utilising action objects, a strategy proposed by Johnotahn Chapman in ‘Emotionally Durable Design’, my collection physically engages the wearer with textile story telling. As youth are unaccustomed to wearing traditional garments like the Lungi, the difficulty found in the attempt to wear them highlights a barrier between the loss of cultural knowledge and the act of revival. Hence my thought process for garment design involved combining the choreography, drape methodology and silhouette of lungi styles with functionality. This is where manual elements of wrapping and tying the cloth are held in priority alongside zipper flys, waistbands, belt loops, buttons, ties and pocketing that support ease of wear. 

At the same time, I extend this philosophy to my experimentation with repurposing katran (fabric scraps). Linked to indigenous understandings towards resources and waste, I have developed my practice to recognise value in the discarded. In saying so, the process of trying to resolve this technique was tedious and challenging, but every moment I spent with my katran I felt connected to something bigger than myself, to the people who came before me to something that I can only describe as home. At times where I felt like giving up, I was encouraged to persevere by the regenerative fashion readings that increasingly fueled my passion for change. Of significant support was the anthology, ‘Islamic Fashion and Anti Fashion’ edited by Annelies Moors and Emma Tarlo. The voices of Muslim women in this text highlighted how they met the weight of alienation with defiance through deliberate cultural and religious dressing. I found strength in their refusal to dilute ethnic identity and the idea that integration shouldn’t require sacrifice. Taunting the idea of what it takes to belong, the katran textures exclaim that we need not throw away parts of our identities to be accepted, instead we belong because we are. 

Further informing my design thinking, Consumed by Aja Barber reinforced the importance of transparency and traceability within fashion value chains. Barber’s call for adjacent systems that challenge the exploitation of the Global South pushed me to consider not only what I design, but how I source, and who is centered in the process. As I run my hands through my Lungi fabrics I notice slubs and imperfections in their weaves; tracing a direct line between fibre, craftsperson and wearer. I see the cotton farmer in a village similar to mine, a skilled weaver who mastered their practice, my father, grandfather and uncles who wore lungi once before and my community who will receive this collection in the future. 

For me, the process of fashioning the Lungiwala was a journey of personal healing and a challenge to foster collective empowerment. I do not claim to have solved the tensions between tradition and modernity, belonging and diaspora or identity and expression, but I choose to hold them, to wear them and to keep working through them. My hope is that my collection offers my community acknowledgement of our struggles and courage to reclaim our identities. Looking forward, I anticipate being part of a fashion future where our land, people, culture and practices aren’t exploited but rather appreciated and used as a blueprint for sustainable design. While this vision is ambitious, I use my lungi and my katran to begin breaking barriers and to begin the difficult conversations. If fashion has long been used to strip us of identity, then let it now be the tool in which we reclaim it. 

LUNGIWALA