Introducing The Loom: Fashion as Culture, Labour, Politics, and Heritage

Fashion is usually written about as spectacle. Runways, trends, seasonal collections, celebrity wardrobes. The industry produces endless commentary on what is in and what is out.

But clothing has always been more than aesthetics.

A garment carries within it the labour of the people who made it, the materials drawn from the land, the cultural codes that shape how bodies are seen in public, and the political histories that determine who profits from its production.

To look closely at clothing is to see the structure of the world.

For centuries the Indian subcontinent stood at the centre of the global textile economy. Cotton fabrics woven in Bengal, block printed chintz from Gujarat, and silk brocades from Banaras travelled across trade routes that connected Asia, Africa, and Europe. Long before Paris became synonymous with couture, textile innovation in South Asia shaped how much of the world dressed.

That system did not disappear naturally. It was dismantled.

The rise of British industrial textile mills was inseparable from the restructuring of India’s agricultural and artisanal economies. Cotton cultivation expanded under colonial pressure, while handloom industries that had once supplied global markets struggled to compete with machine-made cloth produced in Lancashire. What had been a centre of textile manufacturing was gradually repositioned as a supplier of raw material.

The modern fashion industry emerged from these shifts.

Clothing is often treated as frivolous, but its history reveals something else entirely: the deep entanglement of fashion with empire, labour, and trade.

The politics of clothing did not end with colonial rule. During India’s independence movement, spinning and wearing khadi became a political act. Through the swadeshi movement, textiles were transformed into symbols of economic self-reliance and resistance.

In the contemporary fashion system, these questions remain unresolved.

Garments move through supply chains that span continents. Designers present collections in Paris, Milan, and New York, while embroidery, weaving, and garment construction often take place in workshops and factories across South Asia. When tragedies such as the Rana Plaza collapse expose the conditions under which clothing is produced, the industry briefly confronts the human cost embedded in its supply chains.

At the same time, fashion is facing another reckoning. The industry’s environmental footprint is immense. Cotton farming, synthetic fibres, chemical dyes, and discarded garments all contribute to ecological strain.

The question now being asked across the industry is simple but difficult: what does it mean for fashion to become sustainable?

Yet sustainability is not only a matter of materials or recycling technologies. It also concerns the survival of craft traditions, the livelihoods of artisans and garment workers, and the cultural knowledge embedded in textiles.

These are the questions The Loom will explore.

The loom is where threads intersect to form cloth. It is also a fitting metaphor for fashion itself, where culture, labour, politics, and heritage are woven together.

This space is not concerned with trends. It looks instead at the deeper forces shaping how clothing is made, worn, and understood.

Fashion is rarely just about clothes. It is about the systems that produce them.