An exhibition promoting Indian textiles is on at the British Council India from the 1st to the 10th of June. It is showcasing work done by professional drawn from India and other parts of the world under a project sponsored by the Department of Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), UK with the objective of reinforcing sustainable practices in the fashion and textile trade in India and UK. The project is initiated by the London College of Fashion in collaboration with the Pearl Academy of Fashion.
A number of Indian and British designers who contributed to the project were Nitin Bal Chauhan, Samant Chauhan, Saurabh Chauhan, Kritika Dawar, Eleanor Feddon, Dhairya Gautam, Katharina Grube, Gaurav Gupta, Varun Gupta, Anjana Jjanardhan, Shahil Jaisingh, Padmaja Krishnan, Gunjan Kumar, Pratyush Kumar Maurya, Esther Miles, Anne Prahl, Holly Pressdee, Nieves Ruiz Ramos, Shazia Saleem, Monalisa Saran and Annemarie Van Der Ven.
This project is aimed at building capacity, sharing best practice, exploring market opportunities and to generate awareness among design students and the designers for using more sustainable Indian textiles. India is an important player in the clothing and textile industry. The industry is a large net foreign exchange earner and is a major employment provider within India. The country is the third largest cotton producer in the world and it accounts for 22 per cent of global spindleage and 61 per cent of global loomage.
In 2009, DEFRA through the Sustainable Development Dialogue (SDD) fund backed the Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at London College of Fashion and Pearl Academy of Fashion, New Delhi to run a project to promote Indian sustainable textiles. Improving patterns of sustainable consumption and production (SCP) in India and the UK is one of the agreed areas for collaboration under the UK: India SDD fund. The project is also part of a body of work taking place under the DEFRA Sustainable Clothing Roadmap, which aims to improve the sustainability of clothing.
