The Voice of Fashion
Sustainability: The Problem with the Grandmother Narrative
Why it is time to stop idealising Indian ancestral living and simple, frugal ways for climate change action in fashion and consumerism
Last week, at the October edition of FDCI x Lakmé Fashion Week in Mumbai’s Jio World Convention Centre, a panel debated ‘Fashion, Climate and the Role of Women’. Presented by RISE Worldwide with the British Council, as part of the event’s Sustainability Day, it tabled a burning topic with impactful speakers. While the panellists spoke about the significance of women as agents of change, yet at several points—like in many conversations and campaigns from India—they kept looping back to the ideal of living simpler, frugal, minimal lives like our grandmothers and ancestors did.
Here is why it may be time to update that narrative.
But first the facts. With Supriya Dravid, editor of Ajio Luxe as a probing moderator, the panel brought to the dais Anita Dongre, well-known designer and pioneer of responsible fashion, Aditi Mayer, digital creator and sustainability activist and Priya Krishnamoorthy, founder and CEO of 200 Million Artisans. Between them, the talk moved from the needs and challenges of the artisanal sector to issues connected to farming, fashion production and manufacturing, all through the prism of the female gender.
Mayer, who is currently pursuing a National Geographic project in Punjab spoke about women in paddy cultivation in the state, while Krishnamoorthy unfolded a goldmine of how data does and can shape intervention and response. Dongre, who has been instrumental in identifying and training unskilled men and women in villages of Maharashtra besides working with women in crafts communities for impactful linkages between them and fashion, spoke about skilling as a core intervention.
Climate Change Needs More Than a Village
What came up now and then, however, were references made by all speakers in different ways to the India of the past. The ideal agricultural lifestyles and poetic village communities, now lost to the spinning wheel of consumerism, fast and furious fashion, to urbanisation, globalisation that have trampled on how the planet wheezes today. This is a haloed reference that romanticises the village and the idea of minimalism without delinking it from poverty and forced frugality as it actually was. Or that it is gone (for a majority) because of social rebuilding, innovation, data, technology, gender equal ideas in architecture and to some extent, fashion.
In fact, Dongre mentioned that her emphasis of a simple life may sound incongruent coming from a fashion designer who is inevitably part of the churns of the fashion industry. She is right in the instinctual twinge of doubt she perhaps feels while admirably upholding what she believes in.
The fact is that the Indian (or global) fashion industry as well as the artisanal ecosystem—the focal point at least of this debate—have immensely evolved. No society can go back to an ancestral way of living in the name of climate-related sustainability and then surgically install the benefits from technology, R&D, architectural innovation, design thinking, policy and legal intervention.
India’s artisans are no equals in the spoils of fame and money when compared with designers and traders but they too are dependent on technology and material innovation. They want to be part of the ‘progress’ story which is a bigger social construct than the nylon thread they use or the screen printing derivations their crafts are being adapted to.
From watching Netflix to shopping on Amazon, from needing laptops to learning Instagram marketing to be a relevant part of current ‘Indian life’. They don’t want to sit on charpoys and eat vegetables foraged from forests that surround their huts. They want to cultivate paddy even if they are essentially wheat eaters like in Punjab. They wish to be like the rest of the world for reasons realised by advances in psychology, technology, science and environmental justice. Even if they don’t have words for this kind of evolution.
The evolution of humankind as artists, creators, makers and designers may be riddled with depressing inequalities but it follows the leaps and bounds of science and design. Without R&D, machines that work at superhuman pace, mills that manage large consignments for exports or local supplies, digital pattern making aids, technologically advanced education, processing of vegetable or synthetic dyes, labour unions, civil society saviours, and the controlled environment of factories—fashion would be floundering. Indian crafts wouldn’t be where they are today—the craftsperson’s daughter would not be the family’s Instagram manager.
Even outside the politics of style and dress, the history of meaning, cultural revolutions, issues of class, body, appropriation, material—the fashion industry is a mirror of breakthroughs, momentum and movement.
Not that anyone on any panel in the world needs to be reminded of this. Which is why it may be time to amplify these shifts and rescript the emphasis instead of hailing old times or the ways of our grandmothers.
Women and Climate Change is a Difficult Subject
Ultimately it is about examining the role of influential and privileged women as change agents. Who can work as philanthropists, sensitive policy makers, legal activists, sustainability officers, supply chain investigators, behavioural interventionists and human resource experts to aid their vulnerable counterparts whose lives have been disrupted by climate change. In fashion, we need women to guide material innovation, dyes that don’t pollute earth and air and help innovate with circular fabrics and textiles that live long. And not just women!
As amply argued by scholars and grassroots workers, the marginalised are enormously impacted by climate change. Women are among the most marginalised even among vulnerable communities. There are few things more worrisome and difficult than being female and poor in India or in the subcontinent. The very communities who work with needle and thread on our handmade garments walk hours to fetch drinking water. Many don’t have access to toilets. They scorch and sicken in huts given the rise in temperatures.
An article by Balgis Osman-Elasha, principal investigator with the United Nations’ climate change unit titled “Women…In the Shadow of Climate Change” poignantly explains why. It also cities numbers. “Seventy per cent of the 1.3 billion people living in conditions of poverty are women. In urban areas, 40 per cent of the poorest households are headed by women. Women predominate in the world’s food production (50-80 per cent), but they own less than 10 per cent of the land,” writes Osman-Elasha. It is however the part where she emphasises how women can be helped to adapt to climate change disruptions that needs to be tabled in fashion-related conversations. It should also be among subjects journalists like us report about consistently. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen enough.
Through reporting for many years, however, I do know clearly that rural women don’t want to be or live like their grandmothers. That’s the one narrative they want to hurl out. They want to eat chicken burgers (or well, other non-simple meals), use disposable sanitary pads, diapers for their children, get credit cards and bank loans without checking with their husbands. They want raincoats, not umbrellas when it pours. Pun intended.
As urban women, many hailing from India’s mofussil towns, we don’t want to reclaim the lifestyles of our grandmothers either. It has taken ambition and resistance and several negotiations with self and family to think and act outside the box. That’s why we can be climate change warriors.
It is urgent to rewrite the grandmother narrative. Honouring the complex times we live in without lamenting change is part of the dialogue.
