Merging Lanes From Designing Clothing to Making Jewelry
“Being of Indian heritage, jewelry plays a starring role in our traditions and customs so I like to believe my inclination towards over-accessorizing is in my blood. I love every bit of it —bangles, beads, tassels, and embellishments.”
My creative endeavors kicked off early and naturally blossomed into a colorful creative career. It began with me dressing Sister and myself in bespoke “dresses” made of our mother’s fabric remnants and paper. It was glorious! Sister, our best friend, Liz, and I would spend hours each day, during our summer vacations, playing dress-up in Liz’s room while blasting Debbie Gibson or Madonna from Sister’s Pocket Rocker (iykyk). I hadn’t realized at the time, but Liz was indisputably a cool girl. She was, like, five years old when she showed me how to style a random fabric scrap of my mother’s into a headband or cool necklace. She couldn’t understand why adults didn’t wear tap dancing shoes every day or why she couldn’t realistically wear her shiny, metallic dance costumes to school. She wore clothes for fun, the clothes did not wear her. Liz was my inspiration and I wanted to be like her. We remained friends for years until she moved away and I found myself solo on what was once our own creative little planet, filled with sequins, feathers, and lots of shiny dresses.
Enter grade school, when I learned to sew. My mother introduced me to her Singer machine, piece by piece. An otherwise hasty woman, she took her time to show me what she considered proper techniques as well as the tips and tricks that she had taught herself over the decades. I was too young to realize what I can now see clearly as an adult, that this was her space —sitting at her sewing machine, with a textile between her fingers— that she was able to slow down and truly be in the moment. She was a working immigrant woman with three young children, so I imagine that time for herself to do things that brought her pure joy was a luxury that never seemed to be within reach. Sewing had long been something meaningful that she did as a necessity, alongside Biji (my grandmother), and it seemed to have become an indulgence that she couldn’t afford the means to acquire which, in this case, was time. I can only imagine how soul-sucking that must have been, given how entrenched fabric, sewing, and hand-creating has been in her life prior to coming to America. My great-grandfather was a lifelong employee at a Singer sewing machine factory in Karachi, Pakistan. When the family moved to Lahore, in Northern Pakistan, Biji worked as a seamstress prior to marrying my grandfather. Five births later, they eventually migrated to India, where Biji taught Mom how to sew clothing, out of necessity. For Mom, working with textiles was a fundamental part of her upbringing. She valued it, and therefore, she was able to decelerate during those small amounts of time that she was able to find in order to teach me.
Once introduced to the machine, my interest in fashion took to new heights. I’d tag along to JoAnn Fabrics (RIP) with Mom and sometimes with my Mamiji (aunt) to small, local shops that Mamiji somehow managed to find in pre-internet days. By middle school, I understood the basics and began to repurpose Mom’s old dupattas (scarves) into tops. As I experimented with pattern making in high school, it moved on to dupatta dresses. Everything looked exactly as you’d imagine for a self-taught, high school kid using JoAnn polyester dupes —wonky AF. I’m sure I looked a mess, but I’m also sure that I learned quite a bit and 10/10 would do it again. I graduated high school in 2000, so it was the late 90’s when all of this was taking shape. This was right around the time that I discovered thrift stores, so my natural progression led to upcycling Goodwill finds with Rit dye, lace, and sequin paillettes.
After high school, I moved to nearby NYC and attended a fashion design program at a trade school where I learned, well, the trade —drafting, construction and the hands-on technical aspects of creating clothing. This move was recommended by my high school fine arts teacher, whom seemed to see beyond the skipped stitches and frayed edges in my work. After completing that program, I decided to study Marketing at Fordham University while freelancing in the city. After I graduated, I moved to Austin in 2011. It was here that I began to sell my handmade dresses and skirts directly to clients on Etsy and vendor markets. A huge reason why I chose to leave New York for Austin was to have more space —not only physical space, but also mental and creative freedom. I love New York and still believe it’s the greatest city in the world; but I needed a change, a new set of inspiration sources. It was time for me to head this way. Funny enough, I’ve found Austin to have grown so much in the fourteen years that I’ve been here, that I’m packing up my studio and heading North for some quiet.
I still love designing and keeping up with the industry, but making clothing for sale stopped feeding my soul long ago. In my twenties I was blindly enthusiastic about fashion and learning as much about the ins and outs as possible. My previous project, Navi Bleu, remains very dear to me. In those eight years, I took advantage of opportunities to travel as much as I could, along with my husband. We explored cities and countries together and scouted local markets and garment districts for my favorite things: textiles, embellishments and beads, and vintage clothing. We got it down to a science -he planned the logistics and I focused my research on shopping for the goods. Afterward, I would dig all of my finds out of my suitcase and then designed and hand-made collections around my experience there. For a few seasons, I had an opportunity to work with tailors, textile manufacturers, and dyers in India. The process was exhausting to navigate on my own, but the experience provided a vast amount of knowledge and understanding of not only the clothing manufacturing process, but also of my personal standards. I appreciate the invaluable insight that I acquired by being “on the field” and being involved in every step of the manufacturing process.
A Shift in Mindset —
As I grew into my thirties, I began to reassess my values and adjust what I could control as needed. Small, but meaningful, changes eventually led to a shift in mindset. With time (and age), I found myself less excited about wanting to make pretty things just because, and more inclined to focus on environmental and social concerns. This budding sense of awareness increasingly started to misalign how I chose to work. I felt a mix of guilt and responsibility about being so flippant with our limited resources and for being a part of an industry that is very comfortable being so openly wasteful. The weight of these thoughts, paired with mental burnout started to feel suffocating. I wasn’t actively managing my ADHD at the time, so I was often left with unfinished projects and feelings of overwhelm. I began to hate everything that I loved about making clothing: the process. I sold my dress forms, well two of the clan, and completely stopped sewing for years. In 2020, during the very beginning of lockdown, I opened the large closet in our office and started to remove the hangers, one by one. Each had an individually-draped textile, with a handwritten Post-It on each, with yardage, price, and location info. They were casually waiting for that one day when I’d think of a project worthy of them. Some were over a decade old (not including vintage). That realization was interesting —almost as if I was standing in the middle of a doorframe, unsure of how to feel because opening this door to one room felt right, but closing it to another felt disappointing. I allowed myself one non-negotiable and one “just for fun” from each location: Barcelona, Kyoto, London, Seattle, Tokyo, Istanbul, Lima, Toronto, to name a few. I kept all of my mother-in-law and mother’s Indian dupattas, saris, and random dangly bits that I cut off the unsalvageable. The rest was donated to Austin Creative Reuse. For my remaining sample dresses, with dye runoff or irregular seams, they were cut up into various sizes of fabric that I used for visible mending and also to cover photo mats in my photo frames. For the remainder of the scraps, I began incorporating them into my jewelry. I believe this is when it dawned upon me, that I had apparently moved from the doorframe into the a new room. It was blank, but ready for me to fill it with new pops of joy, while my fabric was off to reach new hands across Austin. I hope amazing things were created using them!
x, Navi