Fashion

Sifar(zero) 
Is a starting point as well as an ending. It’s the uprising and the shattering all at once which leaves ruins as residues to tell our story.
Onions are a part of the daily life of an Indian household. It flavours an uptight elitist gourmet dinner as much as being an essential ingredients in a common man’s humble curry. It transcends class, gender, politics, religion being the very essence of the core masala in our daily cooking.  Its rise in prices has caused governments to fall and migrants to starve.
To bring this narrative into a conscious dialogue, Rishta works closely  with Adivpurenature to create a collection, where the dying is  done with the waste of onions that we consume. They up-cycle the skin of the vegetable  by using its left over  juices and peels in the process. The entire collection  is hand dyed with all natural ingredients on natural fabrics by self-made local artisans. The cutting techniques used maximises the width and length of the cloth to minimise waste.The tailoring is soft, allowing the structure to melt, creating  a contemporary season-less collection, unique in its shapes and organic in its approach. The colours are dominated by the absorption and the imprints of the onions nectar onto the cloth, visually morphing into textures of walls buried in time, a moss township illegally nesting on rock on the outskirts of a city and dried leaves crisp and brittle  from the season gone by. What we consider waste is the sifar  of a new blossom. We call it conscious luxury.
Sifar itself remains ambiguous.It is personal. It is stepping into the unknown with our baggage of emotions. It’s freedom for one and anguish for another, its destruction and hope, it’s darkness with a flickering bulb,  a state of nothingness to begin again.