What do you do when you have a love for fashion, but also a love for sustainability?
You create a sustainable fashion line, of course.
And that’s exactly what Priya Mohan, founder of SariKNOTSari did, a little more than two years after a family trip to India.
Mohan returned home full of regret that she never bought a beautiful, colourful, traditional sari while in India and found herself, weeks later, researching vintage saris to buy and ship to her home in Ontario.
While looking up vintage saris, she thought of a way to buy these antique saris and use them for her current business at the time – a store called The Pale Blue Dot – that sold vintage furniture and sustainable housewares. Initially, she thought the vintage saris she was looking at could be used as fabric wrapping paper.
“But as I started to track down more and more of these gorgeous fabrics, I couldn’t bear the thought of turning these 50-60-year-old pieces into wrapping paper and other small textiles,” she said. “So I took a look at my own wardrobe, and thought, ‘Hey, I could really make these into a clothing brand.’”
From there, she went back to India to meet up with an award-winning designer in Delhi to help turn old saris into modern-day pieces she could wear herself.
A few months later and SariKNOTSari was born.
Distilled in a phrase, SariKNOTSari repurposes high-quality silk fabrics and saris and transforms them into pieces that are more suited to the Western woman’s wardrobe — think boxy tops, kaftans, and loose dresses.
Today, SariKNOTSari is more than just a sustainable fashion brand because it upcycles used saris. That’s just one of the ways it’s sustainable.
“We are sustainable in so many ways,” Mohan said. “For example, we are economically sustainable because we are fair trade and we make sure our artisan partners are paid a fair wage.”
Every single clothing item in SariKNOTSari’s line is hand stitched and created in India by a tailoring family in Delhi that Mohan knows personally.
“I know every single person that does the sewing for us,” she said. “In fact, the head designer for us was actually able to put a down payment on a house in Delhi recently because of the brand. Owning a house in Delhi is like owning a house in New York City – it just doesn’t happen. So when someone can own a house in India, especially Delhi, that not only changes the life of the person who owns it, but it changes the family’s economic state for generations.”
The brand is also sustainable because, according to Mohan, it is low waste.
“Our designs are made so they use as much of the fabric as possible,” she said. “And we use the remnant fabric to make scrunchies, tote bags, headbands, or whatever we can think of to use that fabric up entirely.”
And finally, the brand is sustainable because it cuts clothing so that each piece can be worn even if your body grows or shrinks over time.
“That’s part of the beauty of the brand,” Mohan explained. “We created our clothing so it’s essentially one size fits all, very much the same way a sari drapes across the body, so do the pieces we create. So whether you’re a size small or a 3X, our pieces will look good on every size no matter how your body changes throughout the years. And because the fabric is made to drape and be layer-able, it’s made for more than just one season.”
Plus, all the clothing items are made from silk – which is one of the strongest clothing fibers there is. So, they are made to last, which also bodes well with the sustainability angle, Mohan added.
Today, SariKNOTSari has a storefront in Hamilton, Ont. and an online space where you can shop their designs 24/7. Visit the brand’s website, here.