This Puducherry-based fashion brand focuses on sustainability

Starting with cotton farmers, weavers, printers, tailors and all invisible people who make fashion happen. Her mission is to create conscious sustainable fashion by taking care of the environmental costs and not passing them on to the future.

“For us, the design should be creative and problem-solving. Be it any problem — post-tsunami trauma, farmers’ suicides, garbage littering, weavers losing their jobs — Upasana looks at social issues as spaces for change. Farmers’ suicides in the cotton belt has impacted the fashion industry tremendously. Our commitment is to making the clothing industry a dignified sector, instead of exploiting it,” says Uma, who has exhibited her collection at the recently concluded Chennai International Fashion Week.

The designer has combined handloom fabric with her signature design vision to create stylish contemporary clothes and accessories. When thousands of cotton farmers in India took their lives because of debts and agricultural crises, Uma who had always deplored the conditions in the garment industry decided it was time for a change.

Talking about the survival of slow fashion, she says, “Slow fashion is a mindset and priority we plan for ourselves. We should focus on short-term benefits. With 54 million people serving in the textile clothing and craft sector, fashion becomes a vehicle to make an impact. The choice we have to make is whether the impact should be positive or negative. The future is handmade and it is time to prepare ourselves for that. I believe that environment-friendly fashion is the way forward,” stresses Uma.

The designer, who has always championed for organic cotton fabrics, says materials like organic cotton, khadi, indigo and natural dyes, would sustain for longer periods and more brands should come forward to use them.