London through India: our journey
“Nothing to it but to do it”, or so the saying goes, as IKTIYAR's journey began in early 2016.
Following years of research and with a head full of ideas, we headed to India to understand more about the welfare, training and employment opportunities available to some of society's most vulnerable women, and to see if we could meet with a group of women with whom we could make IKTIYAR's luxury sustainable fashion vision a reality. Having been raised by a single mother, and knowing all too well the lifechanging power of education and employment, we were determined to pay it forward and to build our brand from the bottom up, i.e. by training ourselves the women that would make our first collection.
And so over the course of that year, and the next few, we made multiple visits to India, travelling far and wide across the country from Amritsar's farmlands in the northern state of Punjab, to Karnataka's slum communities in South India.
It was difficult to know whether we were totally committed or totally deluded(!), as we found ourselves spending our annual leave, year after year, publishing ads in local newspapers and working our way through calling and visiting never-ending lists of government state departments for women, police support lines for vulnerable women, "this person" and "that person" that someone had heard was doing "something good for women" and a wide variety of women’s shelters, charitable institutes and NGOs and many different training and support organisations focused on supporting women. We would find ourselves visiting people's houses. Sometimes offices and other official looking buildings. And sometimes nondescript huts located after the fruit stall and before the temple some floors up behind a door with no sign....
Where people allowed us in, we leapt at the opportunity to explain, as best we could, why and how a lawyer from London (plus partner-in-crime husband, mother or sister, depending on who had been roped into the latest set of travels) wanted to try to create a training and employment opportunity for women on the other side of the world while also, at the same time, trying to learn what we could from every person with whom we spoke.
We spoke to a lot of people. Civil servants in-charge of government run women’s shelters. Women living in those shelters. Women attending charity-funded training courses. Policemen responding to calls from abused women. Women working in garment factories and fashion houses. Unwell, abused and and other vulnerable women on whom society had firmly closed its doors. Husbands and father-in-laws of wives and daughter-in-laws that "supported women working" but just "not at the moment". Young women that wanted to work and study but were being married off to lighten the family's load. And the list went on.
Even for those women that were employed in a garment factory or by a fashion house, and particularly for high value garments or "Western" or other "non-traditional" clothing, it quickly became clear that women were often being relegated to repetitive, low-skill tasks, and as subordinates to male “master” tailors. Where male “master” tailors would take a customer's measurements, draft patterns, cut fabric and stitch all manner of garments from start to finish, we found that women were often being confined to the same repetitive task, i.e. sewing 250 sleeve cuffs or 250 shirt collars, day in, day out, and with no real training or development opportunities.
A McKinsey report from 2019 notes that between 40-160 million women globally may need to transition into higher skill roles by 2030, as a greater share of those women’s jobs may be replaced by automation. And in India, for example, the same McKinsey report notes that 90% of the workforce is not formally trained.
And so going forward, the question becomes even more relevant. How will these anticipated developments affect women in some of the poorest parts of the world? How will they affect women in India? Worldwide? What role can the fashion industry play in levelling out opportunities for training, development and fair employment? How can we support consumers to make more conscious purchasing decisions?
Images: IKTIYAR, India 2016-2017