Sonja Batik Set
The Summer House· New
~ £180
The Five Movements
Heritage Labs.
Ancient craft, future form. Ateliers putting handloom, block-print, kantha, and ajrakh on the substrate of the garment, not the trim.
23Ateliers in residence
The technique is not applied to the cloth — it is the cloth. Block-print on cotton, kantha on handloom, ajrakh on Kachchh substrate: remove the process and there is nothing left to wear. Heritage Labs pieces read at the level of the material because that is what the maker built — not a design laid over a base cloth, but a cloth that begins and ends in the workshop.
New Luxury.
Dress like you own the room.
2Ateliers in residence
The tradition is the garment's first credential — not the occasion it attends, but the weeks and workshops that built it. New Luxury holds space for restraint and maximalism at once: the hand-welted sole and the beaded commission both belong here, provided the craft is named and the labor is legible. What distinguishes this register is not opulence — it is the proof embedded in the cloth itself.
Ateliers in New Luxury
Third Culture.
Neither here, nor there. Heritage as accent, not substrate. The hyphen is not a compromise — it is the construction method.
Two places, one construction — held in tension, not reconciled. Third Culture does not resolve the place-pair: it wears it. Heritage enters at the level of accent — a single gesture in an otherwise contemporary silhouette — because the cloth is already carrying two formations at once. Bombay × Brooklyn, Bandra × Berlin: the seam is where the places meet.
BAMBAI BEATS.
Bandra rooftop
Dharavi gully
South Bombay press
Dharavi gully
South Bombay press
Gully-orange on a tiled rooftop. Screen-print is the design, not the surface.
The press run is the production unit — not the pattern, not the fabric choice, not the silhouette. Bambai Beats operates in the tradition of the printed notice, the gully poster, the South Bombay pamphlet: the graphic carries the argument, and the cloth is its surface. Register decides: a hand-stitched garment in the street-press tradition belongs here as surely as a screen-print run.
The Utilitarian.
The Tuesday garment. Materials honest about what they are.
6Ateliers in residence
The Utilitarian garment earns nothing on the hanger — it earns everything on the Tuesday it gets worn. Clean construction, honest materials, no visible hands: the design has stepped aside so the wearer can get on with the day. This is not the absence of craft — it is the discipline of making clothing that performs without asking to be noticed.
Ateliers in The Utilitarian