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Pratibha Syntex · 2008 to 2012 · India

Fashion &
Sustainability

Four years inside a garment factory, learning who really makes our clothes.

As a young designer, I lived and worked inside Pratibha Syntex, a rural Indian garment factory, to see the world behind the label.

Garment workers at sewing machines on a factory floor
My role
Designer, living on siteFour years inside the factory compound Upcycled collectionNew designs made from the factory's off-cuts Mentorship programmeBringing student designers behind the label FilmmakerChalo Let's Go!, a documentary, 2011
The brief

Fashion hides the people who make it, and the waste it leaves behind. Go and live where the clothes are made.

A model wearing a red and black upcycled dress against a blue factory door
Factory waste

From off-cuts to a book cover

When I arrived, I couldn't stop looking at the piles of off-cut fabric. So I turned them into an upcycled collection.

It was recognised by the Centre for Sustainable Fashion in London, and later made the cover of Fashion & Sustainability: Design for Change.

Cover of the book Fashion and Sustainability: Design for Change, featuring the upcycled collection
Mentorship

Behind the label

I set up and ran a mentorship programme that invited student designers to come and work inside the factory, and see fashion from the side most people never do.

A designer working at a cutting table on the factory floor
Still from Chalo Let's Go: a young woman smiling in a spinning mill

Chalo Let's Go!

Watch the film on Vimeo →

In 2011 I made a documentary following two young fashion designers as they discovered the machines, materials and people behind mass manufacturing. In 2012 it was shortlisted for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

What I learned

Go to where it's made.You can't design well for a system you've only seen in slides. Living there changed everything I thought I knew.
Waste is a brief.The off-cuts nobody wanted became the work people remembered.
Design with the people closest to it.Everything I've done since, from Rwanda to AI, started here.
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