Kriti Tula started her design firm Doodlage in 2012. Her brands aesthetic is childlike and ethical at the same time.
The Doodlage team are India’s first designer dumpster divers. They collect leftover snippets of beautiful cloth from other design houses that would otherwise throw away these katrans. Kriti takes what was fashion waste and makes it something fun.
Every piece is slightly different, because, well, it’s hard to find identical kartans of cloth. She’s both junkyard diving to fashion. The result is fun and also an intelligent use of what would’ve ended up as waste.
It’s reaping the rewards. Apart from several fashion shows, becoming a growing cult name among Bollywood’s young and trendy, last year, the company made into Elle magazine’s Graduates finals.
There’s a feel-good factor that accompanies the knowledge that we are working on upcycling not adding the waste that has already been produced.
While usually, we’d shoot a woman’s closet in her, well, closet, Kriti’s studio and production floor are from where she gets her clothes. “Seriously, if something, even small things, goes wrong with the outfit my karigars just give it to me say ‘yeh aapke liye banaya hai madam.”
On an average, how much time do you spend in the studio weekly?
The studio is where almost all our time is spent. Monday to Saturday, morning till evening, the studio is our base camp. That’s on an average 60 hours a week, very often more! The best thing about the space is that the room itself is a long space, and we plan to add dividers which can be used to make partitions within it to make any size of the room we need at the time.
We would want the Doodlage studio to be a place for exploring and developing innovative ideas for everything related to upcycling and sustainable fashion.
What’s your favourite part of what you do?
The best part of it is working with different kinds of material, creating garments and silhouettes that collaborate with a variety of fabric, in a way that they are replicable. Each garment needs to be put together from whatever we have available. Of course, there’s a feel-good factor that accompanies the knowledge that we are working on upcycling and not adding to the waste that has already been produced.
Where do you see Doodlage heading to over the next five years?
World domination! (Just kidding!) We would like to diversify regarding product categories and markets. The aim is to make sustainable fashion attainable to everyone – which means working with menswear, childrenswear, even home furnishing, accessories. We would want the Doodlage studio to be a place for exploring and developing innovative ideas for everything related to upcycling and sustainable fashion.
It’s easy to see that the brand’s ethic emanates from the designer herself who is cutting in her jokes but is also easily coaxed into a genuine smile that lights up her face.
Also Read: The Transitionally Traditional Style of THOT’s Co-Founder Manisha Prakash
CREDITS:
PHOTOGRAPHY: HIMANSHU BAGAI, SEE MORE OF HIS WORK IN OUR OTHER #CLOSETSOFNEWDELHI POSTS
PHOTO EDITING: AMAL B
Next up in this series:
Closets of New Delhi: the artistic, detailed style of colourist Tanya Goel
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