Livelihoods

For generations, master artisans across India and the Global South supplied luxury markets while their names stayed hidden behind export houses, intermediaries and non-disclosure agreements. A new incubator asks whether that labour can carry its own name and command luxury value. Susan Walker, whose nonprofit Ibu operates from the American city of Charleston, explains how visibility and price might converge.

India's craft sector employs millions of women in home-based work, often paid by the piece and rarely counted in corporate accountability. As machine-made imitations spread, the question of fair pay grows sharper. Katherine Neuman, who runs House of Wandering Silk in Delhi, examines how replication, pricing and storytelling together decide the fortunes of traditional makers.

As slow fashion turns handmade cloth into a selling point, the artisans behind Ikat and Kantha have gained visibility without a matching rise in pay or security. The imbalance raises a pointed question about who profits from the story of craft. Megha Agarwal, founder of Studio Maeve, weighs whether artisan recognition delivers genuine dignity or borrowed branding.

Himroo, a centuries-old silk-and-cotton weave from the city now called Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, had fallen from thousands of handlooms to none still working. Arushi Chowdhury Khanna, who founded the social enterprise LoomKatha, argues that reviving such a craft depends less on preserving skill than on rebuilding the market and the visibility that sustain it, not on the loom alone.

For generations, the women who hand-paint Kalamkari cloth in southern Andhra Pradesh sold their labour without their names attached to it. Anita Reddy, a social worker who founded the artisan collective DWARAKA, set out to change that by placing control of both the making and the pricing with the women themselves, from the first outline to the final price.

The first widely available Lifecycle Assessment study for cashmere has been released, covering nomadic grazing and farmed production systems across China and Mongolia. The study identifies primary production as the dominant impact stage and finds herd-level management and productivity as the key drivers, offering brands a baseline for targeted intervention and sourcing decisions.

Fragmented pilot projects have long defined regenerative agriculture efforts in Pakistan's cotton sector, but mounting climate and market pressures are exposing the limits of that approach. Drawing on a recent industry roundtable, Abou Bakar, Country Representative – Pakistan, CottonConnect, explains what a coordinated national framework would look like, and why farmer incentives and traceability now sit at the centre of that conversation.

Cotton is the raw material on which India's textile and apparel export ambitions rest, and for the second time in a year the government has moved to lower its cost for processors by removing import duties. The measure runs until late October this year. What it does not do is resolve the underlying tension between farm-income protection and industrial competitiveness that has made the duty a recurring site of policy conflict.

Across Latin America, cotton sectors are navigating a modernisation wave that is producing sharply unequal results. The technologies exist; so does the research capacity. What remains fragile is the institutional scaffolding that translates both into farm-level change. Dr Marcelo Paytas, Director at INTA – Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, has spent years working at that fault line, and his diagnosis is precise.

A new lifecycle assessment released today by Cotton Incorporated reframes how the fibre's environmental performance is measured and contested. The study produces a net-negative carbon footprint at the farm gate while leaving open significant questions about the methodological assumptions and farming system consistency that underpin that finding, with implications that extend well beyond the fibre itself.