Artistic interpretations by readers of ‘fashion in quarantine’ that range from the psychological to the physical, from superheroes to Patachitra, dark to lite 

As the grim clouds of COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown by the Indian government took its grip last week, the core idea at The Voice of Fashion was to open a multi-pronged approach to content generation. Besides business bulletins, experiences of designers working from home, other WFH journals and keeping in everyday touch with the industry, bubbled the thought of the Doodle Map. The previous day, I had noticed that Google had added the handwashing icon to its main doodle. It struck me that doodles or drawings made during quarantine that interpreted and expressed freestyle thoughts on fashion in lockdown may bring us sentiments of readers through their talent with the sketching pencil.

The overriding global truth slices into billions of fragments of individual responses. From panic to melancholia, stillness and calm to creative outbursts and perhaps a new self-acceptance of how the human race stands compromised. In these fragments, lies the need to express, to just talk, just breathe, just eat, just dance, just read, just watch, just worry…What about just draw?

The TVOF Doodle Map came from that Just Draw moment. When we put out a call inviting Instagram painters, doodlers, artists to participate in this freewheeling open conclave of expression through drawing, frankly, we did not know the response would be so overwhelming. In five days from March 25 to 31 (the last day of entry), the Doodle Map creatives on Instagram alone got over 300,000 views. Unprecedented in numbers given the work we have done in 21 months of our existence as a platform.