The Third Space, Material

Fits everywhere, belongs nowhere

Fabin Prakash is a Third Culture Kid who never left Chennai. He didn't need a passport to grow up between worlds. He needed a screen. The sneakers he studied as a teenager were made in cities he had never visited, designed for subcultures he had no physical access to, sold in markets that did not know India existed as anything other than a manufacturing floor. He absorbed British terrace culture and American sneaker obsession and Japanese construction philosophy through the same internet that was teaching kids in Lagos and São Paulo and Jakarta the same references at the same time, and when he looked around Chennai for something that held all of those references together in a single object, it was not there. The space that matched his identity did not exist. So the first thing he had to build was the space itself, before he could make anything inside it.

Echos Above and the Space That Did Not Exist

This need to belong is what gave birth to Echos Above. Fabin studied law at VIT because that door was open, but designing sneakers had always been the dream. When no manufacturer in India could execute the sketches he was carrying, he built his own facility. The first drop is called Awayday, named after the 1980s British terrace culture where football supporters wore luxury sportswear on the stands as an act of self-styling that had nothing to do with the brand's intended customer. That reference alone tells you where Fabin's head lives: in the specific corners of global culture that only someone watching closely from a distance would find, and finding them would feel like recognition rather than discovery. The sneakers are made in his own facility in Chennai by women artisans who have been handcrafting footwear for over two decades, and they arrive in colorways like lemongrass yellow and corsage pink that have never existed in the Indian sneaker market because no one operating within a single cultural framework would have thought to put them there. The suede panels feature tonal stitching and a signature cloud detail, and the construction holds up against anything coming out of Portland or Herzogenaurach, but the shoe does not reference either city. It does not reference Chennai either. It sits in the space Fabin built because he could not find it anywhere else, and the person who picks it up and feels immediately at home in it is the person who has been living in that same unnamed space their whole life.

Imli Dana and the Indian Punk

Shradha Kochhar made the opposite journey and arrived at the same place. She grew up in Delhi watching her grandmother knit and following her father to cotton farms and spinning mills, absorbing a material vocabulary that was so deeply embedded in daily life she did not recognize it as an education until she was at Parsons in New York, trying to explain to classmates why she could not stop working with her hands. Brooklyn gave her Collina Strada, Marshall, Columbia, and Tory Burch, and a gallery scene that understood her textile sculptures as art. Delhi gave her a grandmother named Mallika who crochets half of every knitted piece and sends it across the ocean to be assembled in a Crown Heights apartment. Shradha exists in the space where those two cities overlap, not on any map but at the exact place where every Imli Dana garment is made. She has called what she does "its own version of Indian punk."

Shradha Kochhar made the opposite journey and arrived at the same place.

The punk is in the making. Imli Dana's patchwork shirts are assembled from pre-consumer textile waste collected in bulk from garment manufacturing factories across Delhi, fabric that the formal industry has already decided is finished, cut into new cloth by the brand's tailor, Fida Hussain, who has been sewing every patchwork piece from the brand's Delhi workshop for four years. The crocheted and knitted pieces are split across two time zones and two generations: Shradha's grandmother, Mallika, working from her home in Delhi, and Shradha herself finishing in Brooklyn, with the garment arriving as a single object whose seams hold two cities inside. The brand works with kala cotton, spinning it by hand into yarn that becomes the foundation of textile sculptures exhibited at Donna Karan's Urban Zen gallery and Mana Contemporary. The name itself is the tell. Imli dana, tamarind seed, because Shradha has always been fascinated by the parallel between textiles and food, how both are grown and nurtured and crafted to sustain, and putting those two Hindi words together produces something that is not quite a real phrase but feels exactly right, the way a garment stitched between Delhi and Brooklyn is not quite from either city but could not have come from anywhere else.

The Third Culture Has a Name

This feeling of not quite being from anywhere but could be from everywhere is a condition that has a name. In the 1950s, the American sociologist Ruth Hill Useem studied families who moved between countries and observed that their children did not fully belong to either their parents' home culture or the culture in which they lived. They belonged to a third thing, assembled from both and identical to neither, and Useem called them Third Culture Kids. The term survived because it described something a generation of people had been feeling without language for it: the condition of being fluent in multiple places and native to none, of carrying references from everywhere and having a sense of home built rather than inherited. Useem was writing about expatriate families in India, but this also applies to designers now building the most interesting work within the Third Culture code. They are doing exactly what those children did: taking what each culture gave them and making something that belongs to the specific space where all of it overlaps.

Biskit and the Concept

Harsha and Shruti Biswajit are the most literal versions of this biography on the list. Raised in Madras by a father who was a cartoonist and illustrator and a mother who was a painter and sculptor, Harsha studied economics at Nottingham, political economy at Warwick, and digital fine art at SVA in New York before landing in Berlin, where he now lives. Shruti studied at FIT in New York, spent time in Milan, and interned with Helmut Lang. They conceived Biskit in Brooklyn in 2017, set up the studio in Madras, and decided from the start that the brand would work with concepts rather than seasons. The first concept was Space, launched the same year as ISRO's PSLV-C37 mission, which put 104 satellites into orbit in a single launch, and the Biswajits wanted to tell that story through their own lens rather than the Western one that had always owned the narrative of space exploration. Every piece is handcrafted in the Madras studio using organic, recycled, or deadstock fabric, stitched with thread made from recycled plastic, and limited to twenty-one editions. The logo is an impossible object, a rectangle whose perspective shifts from top to bottom, designed to hold two viewpoints in one symbol, the way the brand holds multiple geographies in one garment. Biskit does not describe itself as a fashion label. It describes itself as a multidisciplinary art and design concept, which is what happens when two people who have lived in enough places to know that none of them is home decide to build the one place that is.

The Third Space

This space between cultures is the central argument of Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture, written in 1994. He argues that this space is not empty, but rather creates its own identity. The person negotiating between two traditions does not end up with a diluted version of each. They end up with a third thing that carries the weight of both and the limitations of neither, and Bhabha called this the Third Space. The term was academic when he wrote it. What the designers in this code have done is make it material. A sneaker that references Liverpool terraces and is made by Chennai artisans in a color neither country would claim. A shirt crocheted across two continents by two women who share a bloodline and a craft but not a city. A tee printed with an Indian satellite mission, designed in New York, sewn in Madras, sold in editions of twenty-one. A blazer cut on Indo-Burmese silhouette grammar over handwoven matha tant. A party dress that is half NRI nightclub and half Sardar Bagh wedding. These are not fusion objects. Fusion implies two things blended into a third, softening both. These are objects that hold multiple identities at full strength without resolving the tension between them, and the tension is the point, because the person wearing them has been holding that same tension their entire life and has never once thought of it as a problem.

The brands coming up behind Echos Above, Imli Dana, Biskit, Ahmev, and Sher Bache will have to understand this if they want to operate inside the Third Culture code rather than just borrow its aesthetics. The temptation will be to treat the code as a mood board — clean lines and gender-neutral sizing and a vaguely global sensibility assembled from Pinterest references — and that work will look right for about one season before it collapses under the weight of having nothing underneath it. What separates the brands that will endure from those that will not is whether the designer's own displacement is present in the garment. The references have to come from a life that actually absorbed them, not from a research deck that compiled them. The material choices have to carry the tension of the places they came from. The Third Culture code is not a style. It is a condition. The garment either carries that condition in its construction or is wearing a costume, and the audience this platform serves can tell the difference in the time it takes to pick up the piece and feel where it was made.