Kavita Parmar (Gorakhpur, India, 51 years old) has her times. Her last business plan, for example, was made for 100 years. “I’m not interested in short-term projects, maybe I won’t see the result, but other people will,” she says. In this interview in her workshop in Madrid she does not mention the word degrowth, but she does not seem interested in expanding too much either. “I have already been a macro businesswoman, I have had a brand with 300 points of sale around the world. I don’t want to grow for the sake of growing. “Nature teaches us that things when they grow too much become tumors,” she says. She believes she has found the measure of it with her brand I Owe You (I owe you), whose main market is Japan: 30 points of sale. “That proportion allows me to design in Madrid and sew in a small workshop in Toledo without accumulating stock.” Plus, she leaves him time to research and design processes rather than products. That is to say, if a brand like Nike hires her it is not to fill the market with one more shoe, but to design a cleaner and more ethical way of producing them. “I no longer create clothes for a single season, I research, I create value chains. And I share everything, I want people to copy me.”
Their latest discovery was the Berber knot, an ancient technique that even the women of the Atlas towns had forgotten. “A company in Marrakech hired me to make a new collection of rugs and I discovered that they had a problem very similar to ours: Morocco was very famous for its merino wool, but they exported it, and now the artisans work with wool imported from China.”
Parmar discovered that there were a few flocks of a species of sheep called siroua left in the Atlas with “long, spectacular, excellent quality” wool. “We signed a contract to buy all the wool from the shepherds, then we took it to the village where the women washed and dyed, and the next thing was to look for weavers who would continue spinning by hand. We found them in Ait Ourir, a small town south of Marrakech,” he recalls. Diving into the private archives of the Yves Saint Laurent library in Paris, Parmar found a complicated knot, similar to a figure eight, the one that the Berbers used to use until the quick and easy Turkish knot took over. “A community of 70 women began spinning again, after 150 years, with the Berber knot, a completely forgotten method.”
The next challenge was the dyes. “I toured the medina from top to bottom, everything they said was natural is false,” says Parmar. He saw that the village weavers had their hands decorated with henna, and he asked them insistently if the wool could not be dyed that way and they always told him no. He went back to the books: it turns out that the ancestors of those weavers did dye wool with henna, at least two centuries ago, it’s just that they had forgotten. The colors and textures of the rugs from that company, Atelier Talasin, have been on display for several weeks at the Royal Tapestry Factory and are for sale. “It is sold directly from the town to any place in the world. It is a luxury project that has put the self-esteem of these artisans in its place,” celebrates Parmar. Prices start at 800 euros and can reach 8,000.
Parmar’s father was a military man and traveled a lot with his family. Parmar experienced his first move at age four. In total, he has lived in nine countries and speaks six languages. He is quick to downplay the latter: “That is very common in my country.” At 17 he wanted to change the world. “To be Che Guevara, to study Economics…, but my parents wanted her, like a good Indian woman, to be a doctor or a teacher. I rebelled, tried to enter the London School of Economics and, not getting the scholarship, I looked for a summer job accompanying some fashion students on a trip to Asia: India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. That opened my mind and eyes. The first time I entered a Thai weaver’s hut I was fascinated. They were very poor, but a lot of wealth came out of their hands and heads. I discovered an economy that was discarded by industrial processes as slow, because it was done by hand and did not produce large volumes, and in the industrial world success is defined by quantity. But we are not robots. If you start demanding volume and speed from a human, what you achieve is divorcing him from his work, he begins to hate what he does.”
She arrived in Madrid in 2001 because she married a Basque man. From her mother-in-law she learned another great life lesson: “We are too poor to buy cheap.” This is a sensitive issue for Parmar: “Today people spend more money on clothes than their grandmothers and have a much worse wardrobe, clothes that no one is going to inherit because they are not made to last 40 years.” She insists: “We fashion designers are burned out. Before this job was wonderful, you had time to think and create something new, now we are in copy-paste, all the collections are too similar. Creative directors dance more than ever between brands because it is a role that no longer matters. And I think that, in addition to the clothes, we would have to design the production chains.”
That’s why she no longer goes to knitting fairs. “I buy the fiber directly, because I don’t know if what they tell me is true, even the certifications are sold. “The word sustainable has lost all its meaning.” Parmar wishes a renaissance for fashion like that of gastronomy. “No one would buy a wine that says Rioja made in China, however we happily buy cashmere made in China.”
He is patient and believes, like Gandhi, that you have to get up and walk to achieve change. “I know a lot of young people who only buy second-hand clothes. There is a consciousness that is growing and I am just putting more fuel on that fire.” Global sales of second-hand clothing rose 18% last year and it is believed that by 2028 the business could exceed $350 billion, according to a report by GlobalData for resale specialist ThredUp.
“Artificial intelligence is already here. We have lost the volume war, but we can win the quality war. That is our territory and there we would have to return, to the processes, to the method, to the raw materials. People are planting tomatoes on the balcony, why can’t we learn to knit a sweater?”
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