10,000 manhours, 300 karigars, 20,000 beads, 1,500 hand embroidered butterflies and flowers—does the promotional value of artisanal work justify price and elevate the intangible value of a garment? Do artisans benefit?

The math of artisanal labour—a breakdown of the number of hours that go into making a garment—is now an avowed promotional strategy by many couture houses. Almost two decades back, when a multi-hued dress by designer Manish Arora for his 2007 show at Paris Fashion Week worn by a black model was applauded for its 1,500 hand-embroidered butterflies, it caused a moment of flutter, at least in Indian publications.

Fashion’s labour is no longer a little butterfly on our collective radar. As designer ateliers struggle for promotional distinction in a space overstimulated with visual content, fashion has a returning romance with craftsmanship. Counting and promoting working hours of artisans, the number of threads they use, the flowers they embroider, the buttons and embellishments they sew on, is a part of the Crafts Rush.

A Rahul Mishra couture ensemble, made for Isha Ambani Piramal for this year’s Met Gala, was promoted for taking 10,000 hours to make. A gown by couturier Manish Malhotra worn by Peruvian TV host Natalie Vertiz on the red carpet of Cannes Film Festival 2024 was “perfected” over 1700 manhours. American model Gigi Hadid wore a sculptural Thom Browne dress, also to the Met Gala, that reportedly had 2.8 million beads and took 5000 hours to make. The artisanal label péro by Aneeth Arora recently put out limited edition jackets from her past collections. Among the designs is a crocheted jacket from 2017 featuring 3,000 hand embroidered and handstitched crocheted flowers, each beaded in the centre. Influencer Nancy Tyagi who flew into the eye of attention on the Cannes red carpet said her self-stitched gown used 1,000 mt of fabric and took 30 days to make. At the Dada Saheb Phalke awards earlier this year, actor Kareena Kapoor Khan wore an asymmetrical AJSK multi-kali ensemble featuring “60 panels adorned with 1,20,000 mirrors hand-embroidered by 100 master craftsmen”.

Natalie Vertiz in Manish Malhotra, Gigi Hadid in Thom Browne and Kareena Kapoor Khan in AJSK.

That’s a lot of numbers. It belies factual counting of actual factory hours put in by a single artisan or multiple karigars working the shift, as it would be hard to find logs to take to court if a claim were to be disputed. But that’s not the point.

These details drive curiosity, they elevate value of a garment and often help the designer justify its price as many argue.

The Arithmetic of Artisanal Work

Yet, manhours marketing also makes this a subject of debate. Does the practice discriminate against other kinds of labour pooled into the same collection not linked to embroidery or hand-skills? For instance, actor Alia Bhatt’s Instagram post about her Sabyasachi sari for Met Gala 2024 described the piece as having taken “1,965 hours and 163 dedicated individuals, including master craftspeople, embroiderers, artists and dyers.” It is a more equitable breakdown, including dyers, if not helpers who unspool yarn or count precious stones sewn on saris.

An ensemble by designer Rahul Mishra that took over 10,000 hours to make.

On the other hand, Mishra, recognised for his embroidered couture that interprets nature, climate and human-animal ecosystem montaged with futuristic ideas, argues by saying “the story of couture is not about consumption but about participation. And the math denotes the number of people involved.”

While these claims invoke value for the garment and respect for its maker(s), they do raise several questions about artisanal rights.

First: is it even possible to keep a register of facts to back such claims?

Arora says it is. At péro, the extensively catalogued archives include designs, details, colours and examples of literally every button and thread, every bead and crocheted flower, lace or embellishment. “From a designer’s perspective it helps achieve price justification to the customer as every piece we make is also hand seamed on both sides. It is our duty to tell the customer what goes behind the piece they are paying for. Some customers like to know these details,” she says. Explaining that while there may be ateliers where actual counting and logging is difficult and exporters don’t always stick to contracts signed while accepting orders, there are ways to do it. “We create all samples or designs by the metre. Sometimes a particular kind of embroidery is made on a 10-inch x 10-inch swatch. Tracking the number of hands involved, including those who supply trims and tools, how many hours they worked in the factory and a count of the total métrage of the fabric embroidered or beaded yields a fairly accurate figure,” she explains.

Designer Ashdeen Lilaowala, his name and atelier associated with Parsi gara embroidery on saris and stitched garments, offers a similar logic. “The math is not difficult as we work with an eight-inch piece for embroidery, and then if it is a sari we multiply it by nine metres. If a particular swatch of a pre-fixed length has 1,000 French knots for instance, totalling the length of that fabric will give an accurate count of all French knots,” he says. However, he agrees that there is space for exaggeration in some claims for a bit of drama. “With the sustainability flag currently flying high, it is easy to jump on this bandwagon of promotional hype,” he adds. Also, generalisations creep in. A “heavy” sari is synonymous with longer labour, but lighter pieces may involve several stages of design dexterity that are not counted. Lilaowala informs that many fashion houses commission embroidery jobs to units outside their own workplaces. “They are small entrepreneurs and the ‘labour’ involved is counted by them, but we don’t know how many people were recruited to embroider and for how many hours.”

In India, artisanal labour, including the embroidery that the world gasps at, is not only cheap and easily accessible but can be easily moulded towards the design goals of couturiers. Unlike weavers who have their own ideologies in design and patterning, understand the legacy value of their work sharply, embroidery karigars are happy to be directed by designer teams in cities as participants in a broader creative network.

Artisans working on an Ashdeen design; A campaign image from the brand.

The wondrous explorations within embroidery as in the work of Mishra, Arora and the rightful celebration of such skills through Dior’s globally noted collaboration with the Chanakya School of Crafts in Mumbai for embroidered creations both wearable and as art, have shifted the emphasis of “karigari” to lean heavily towards embroidery. It is quickly interpreted as the heft behind couture made in India. Sometimes the narrative glosses over other stages and skills. Weaving for instance, the bedrock of artisanal Indian design, gets overlooked.

What About Time Taken for Weaving?

Little surprise then, that while exponents of contemporary woven experiments in Indian textiles do not grudge the industry promoting the math of artisanal labour, they seldom resort to statistical hype themselves. Ask Gaurav Jai Gupta of Akaaro. “I am not a big believer of this practice. Perhaps for a layperson it is attractive, and some people appreciate the complexity. After all, we live in a data-driven world where numbers matter in marketing,” he says, while throwing several pertinent questions into the mix. “What happens if the piece created is not pretty? Do manhours then matter or not?” he asks. The math is a lot more complex in textile engineering, says Gupta, which involves warping, threading, punching cards at a loom or changing the yarn multiple times. “Most important is design, an integral part of what a designer creates—that is hard to calculate and value through numbers, it is like putting a number to a piece of art,” he says.

The artistic value of weaving and other design experiments with textiles outside embroidered couture do get oversimplified if campaigns are built around crafts-specific man-hours. It is a reductive approach. KH Radharaman, creative director of Advaya, the Bengaluru headquartered brand, feels there is no objective way to stand on one side of this debate. “Weaving is partly craft, art and construction engineering of warp and weft density. There are many processes in handloom or machine weaving which are seldom discussed,” says Radharaman arguing that for him, craftspeople are knowledge workers. “How do we calculate the worth of that knowledge by reducing it to laboriousness?” He is however clear that it is the brand owner’s prerogative to shape the brand story. “A certain set of consumers are wowed by details like artisanal labour. People have also begun to talk about the value of garments and this has become a selling point for some,” he says.

Quality, Craftsmanship and Artisanal Rights

Textile artist Swati Kalsi, who has for years, worked with female Sujani embroiderers of Bihar, and other clusters such as one in Chamba in collaboration with the Delhi Crafts Council, believes that the value of a piece calculated by artisanal labour makes sense only after having a closer look at the craftsmanship. In other words, quality is equally important. “Manhours are but one measure of a crafts product,” she believes. Kalsi, like Jai Gupta and Radharaman agree that manhour calculation opens the Pandora’s box on artisanal rights. “It will help if designers educate consumers about all tangible and intangible inputs that go into the making of a brand. If designers can convince buyers about the price and information, artisans may get more work as a result.”

A closer look at Sujani embroidery undertaken during a workshop at Delhi Crafts Council.

Till that kind of direct benefit of smart marketing trickles down, it may be important to consider that wages remain fixed for artisans working in city factories. According to the wage laws in Delhi-NCR, updated in 2023, for instance, the minimum basic wage for unskilled workers is stipulated at ₹17,234 per month, with ₹260 as a Variable Dearness Allowance (VDA). For semi-skilled workers, it is ₹18,993 per month and ₹286 VDA. Skilled workers are entitled to a minimum basic wage of ₹20,903 per month and ₹312 VDA per month. So even if the most hyped garment with 3,000 hours in its making hits an Instagram high, the artisan takes back the same money each month. There may be a performance incentive and a festival bonus, but it’s a no brainer that the amount earned by the artisan may not be even one-tenth of the price of a couture piece that begins at several lakhs.

This is the crux of this debate: does it then make it the math of artisanal labour a fair promotional strategy?

Nilesh Priyardarshi who launched the Ahmedabad-based Kaarigar Clinic to help artisans from Kutch and other districts become entrepreneurs by aiding them with training, strategy, awareness and marketing, says this practice of celebrating crafts labour is totally unfair to artisans. The man behind the recognition and rise of craftswoman Pabbiben finds it an uphill task to fight for artisan’s rights. “Without artisans, no designer can make any of the couture pieces they promote. However, not even once has any designer named the artisan who embroiders on their designs, no credit is given when the clothes are worn all over the world. What’s the point of just saying that 1,700 hours were spent on making a piece?”

It is important to consider that wages remain fixed for artisans working in city factories.

If some readers may be appalled by Delhi-NCR, government approved wages for skilled workers, Priyardarshi goes on record to say that “70 per cent artisans are paid less than ₹5,000 per month.” He speaks essentially of artisan wages in Kutch and Gujarat. “Your assessment of ₹18,000- 20,000 per month is only for a select few, the rest don’t even make ₹10,000 after years of work,” says Priyadarshi. His indignation around the math of karigari is palpable. “There should be a transparent supply chain and transparent price structure of garments called ‘artisanal’ by designers. Until that is done, and the artisan credited by name, this hype is just unfair practice.”