Fashion's Appetite for Handmade Irregularity Must Extend to the Labour behind It

Much of the knowledge associated with traditional textiles remains embodied in the skills of spinners, dyers and weavers rather than formally documented. What is lost when that knowledge is recorded mainly through finished textiles rather than through processes of making?
Sayali Goyal: A finished textile can tell you what something looks like. The process tells you why it looks that way. When you watch someone make something, you start noticing decisions that disappear completely from the finished object: how much pressure they use, how they judge colour, when they decide a fibre is ready, how they respond to a mistake, or how they adapt to a particular material on a particular day. As an artist, I find this especially important. Making teaches you things that looking at an object never can.

I also think there is a danger in documenting craft only through its most beautiful finished examples. We end up creating an idealised image of a tradition while losing the messy, experimental and often highly inventive process that produced it. I would like to see much more documentation of hands, tools, gestures, failures, oral histories, local terminology and processes. Sometimes a mistake can tell us more about a material tradition than a perfect finished textile.

Industrial textile production has made cloth cheaper, faster and more uniform. Which material qualities or forms of knowledge have proved hardest to retain when production moves from hand processes to mechanised systems?
Sayali Goyal: I think the hardest thing to retain is the ability to respond to variation. Industrial production is built around consistency. Handmade production often begins with the understanding that materials are inconsistent. A handloom weaver might notice that a yarn is behaving differently because of humidity or because of how it was spun. A dyer might change the process because the water or temperature isn't quite the same. These adjustments are not inefficiencies; they are knowledge.

What gets lost through mechanisation is often this intimate understanding of material behaviour. At the same time, I don't think we should romanticise hand production or treat machines as the enemy. Mechanisation has made textiles accessible at an enormous scale. The question for me is more about what we choose to retain when we industrialise.

Natural dyes are frequently presented as a sustainable alternative to synthetic dyes. Given questions around land, water, mordants, consistency and scale, where does that argument become more complicated?
Sayali Goyal: I think we need to be careful with the word “natural”. There is a tendency to assume that if something comes from a plant, it is automatically sustainable. But a plant still requires land, water, labour and energy. A natural dye system also involves mordants, extraction, heating and wastewater. Once you start producing at scale, these questions become even more complicated. For me, sustainability has to begin by looking at the entire material cycle rather than simply asking whether something is natural or synthetic.

There is also something valuable about the variability of natural dyes. As a textile artist, I actually find that unpredictability fascinating. The colour is affected by season, soil, water, temperature and process. You are working with a living material rather than a fixed industrial formula. So I don't think the answer is to romanticise natural dyes. I think it is to understand them more deeply.

Hand-spun and handwoven textiles are often valued for irregularity, texture and variation, qualities that industrial manufacturing generally tries to eliminate. Has contemporary textile consumption changed sufficiently for these characteristics to be understood as material value rather than defects?
Sayali Goyal: There has definitely been a change. Today, irregularity can be marketed as a luxury. We use words like “handmade”, “unique”, “imperfect” and “one-of-a-kind” to describe qualities that industrial production historically tried to eliminate. But I think there is a slightly uncomfortable question underneath that. We can celebrate irregularity aesthetically without necessarily understanding the labour behind it. A consumer might see a slub in a handspun yarn and call it beautiful imperfection. But the maker may have spent years learning when that slub is intentional, when it is an error and how the yarn will behave because of it.

So I think the next stage is moving beyond simply liking handmade irregularity towards understanding it. That is something I try to do through Cocoa and Jasmine, by creating a deeper vocabulary around material culture. That means not just saying that something is beautiful or handmade, but asking what makes it materially interesting and what histories of labour and knowledge are embedded in it.

Textile traditions are continually modified through new fibres, colours, markets and production methods. At what point does adaptation strengthen a textile tradition, and when can it begin to erode the material knowledge that defines it?
Sayali Goyal: I don't believe traditions need to remain unchanged in order to remain authentic. In fact, most traditions we now think of as “traditional” have themselves been shaped by trade, migration, new materials, technological changes and changing consumer preferences. The question is what happens to the underlying knowledge. If a community adopts a new fibre but continues to understand its own weaving structure, techniques and material relationships, that can be a very healthy form of adaptation. But if the market gradually dictates every aspect of production (what colour should be made, what motif sells, how quickly it needs to be produced, what cheaper material should replace the original), then you can end up retaining the visual language while losing the knowledge system.

At that point, the tradition becomes an aesthetic rather than a practice. That distinction is very important to me.

Museums, archives and collectors have preserved large numbers of historic textiles, but the production communities behind them may be declining. Can textile heritage genuinely be protected if the economic conditions required to keep the underlying skills alive are disappearing?
Sayali Goyal: I don't think an object can be separated entirely from the ecosystem that produced it. A museum can preserve a textile for hundreds of years. But it cannot necessarily preserve the knowledge of how to make that textile. This is one of the contradictions of heritage. We can have extraordinary collections of textiles while the people who made them are struggling to make a living. For me, preservation must therefore include economics. How do we make it viable for a young person to become a weaver? How do we create dignified working conditions? How does the maker participate in the value created when their knowledge becomes desirable in the luxury or design market?

These are cultural questions, but they are also economic questions. And I think this is where cultural organisations, designers, brands, museums and publications have a responsibility. We shouldn't only document a practice when it is disappearing. We should ask what conditions would allow it to continue. I also think craft residencies are a great way to exchange this knowledge.

There is growing commercial interest in traditional textile techniques, particularly among fashion and interiors brands. What safeguards are needed to prevent techniques and motifs from being detached from the communities that developed them?
Sayali Goyal: The first thing is to understand that inspiration and extraction are not the same thing. There is nothing inherently wrong with contemporary designers engaging with historical techniques. Culture has always travelled and evolved through exchange. But there is a huge difference between engaging with a tradition and taking its visual language without acknowledging the people who carry it. At the very least, there need to be attribution, transparency and economic participation.

But I would go further. Communities should have some agency in how their knowledge is represented and commercialised. They should be able to say what can be shared, what shouldn't be shared, and how they want to be represented.

This is something I think about quite a lot in my publishing work. When you photograph or write about a maker, you are also constructing a narrative about them. There is a responsibility in that. The question shouldn't simply be, “Can we use this technique?” It should be, “What relationship are we entering into with the people and knowledge behind this technique?”

India possesses an extraordinary range of textile traditions, yet many remain dependent on relatively fragile networks of artisans, intermediaries and specialist knowledge. Which parts of this textile knowledge base are currently most vulnerable to irreversible loss?
Sayali Goyal: I think some of the most vulnerable knowledge is actually the knowledge we don't immediately recognise as “craft”. We tend to celebrate the weaver, but what about the person who knows how to prepare the fibre before it reaches the spinner? Or the dyer who understands a particular water source? Or the person who knows how to finish a textile so that it acquires a particular softness or stiffness? These forms of specialised knowledge often sit between the more visible stages of production and are therefore much easier to overlook.

I am also concerned about knowledge that is held by only a very small number of practitioners. Once that chain is broken, you can't necessarily reconstruct it from a museum object. This is one reason I am interested in material culture beyond the finished object. Through Cocoa and Jasmine, I have always explored the stories, people, landscapes and systems behind objects. And through my own textile practice, I have become increasingly aware that making is itself a form of research.

You understand something differently when you actually work with a fibre, a dye or a piece of cloth. Ultimately, I think the greatest risk is not that we will stop seeing beautiful Indian textiles. We will probably continue to see them everywhere. Rather, it is that we will continue to reproduce the appearance of a tradition while losing the knowledge that made it possible in the first place. And perhaps that is the distinction I keep coming back to: preserving the object is not the same as preserving the intelligence of the object.