25 Years of Vaishali S: Why Her Handwoven Designs Are Going Global

When actor Alia Bhatt stepped out in a silver handloom sari styled with a bralette instead of a traditional blouse back in March 2023, at the opening of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai, the look went viral. But beyond that was a bigger win: the sari was crafted by artisans working on looms across India, part of a decades-long mission by designer Vaishali Shadangule to bring handwoven textiles to the global stage.

For Shadangule, celebrity visibility is welcome — but it’s never the point.

Today, her network includes over 4,000 artisans across seven Indian states. But growth has never meant acceleration in the conventional fashion sense, because handlooms do not bend to global fashion calendars. If she wants to introduce a new fabric in January, production must begin a year in advance. The planning is perpetual, and work is continuous, ensuring artisans are never without employment.

“I used to go abroad and see the ‘Made in India’ label, but we were always behind the scenes,” she recalls. “We have the skill, the craft, the design, the history, beautiful fabrics, and each village has different weaves. Why can’t we give credit?”

Waste Not

Sustainability may be just a buzzword on Instagram, but Shadangule speaks about it with disarming simplicity. Growing up in Vidisha, a small town in Madhya Pradesh, waste was not an option. Vegetable scraps were reused, plastic milk bags were saved and repurposed, and clothes were handed down or altered rather than discarded.

“We didn’t know the word ‘sustainability’,” she says, “but we practised it.”

That philosophy now shapes the Mumbai flagship store of the Vaishali S label — a space built from discarded doors and windows Shadangule collected from bylanes and took off scrap heaps. The wood, treated and restored, forms installations, hangers and frames. One clothing rack is fashioned from a door frame and a fragment of an embroidery loom. It is a quiet rebuke to fashion’s excesses.

“In India, we say aadha aangan aadha ghar (half garden, half home),” she says, a line that inspired her December show in Mumbai, celebrating 25 years in the business. Shadangule founded her label in 2001 and at the time, many weavers produced only saris, not fabric by the metre.

Convincing them to experiment was difficult. Buying saris just to cut and drape them in unconventional ways felt almost sacrilegious — since she wore them herself — but she persisted. After all, if the textiles were to travel globally, they needed new silhouettes. Shadangule continues, “I started cutting and draping saris in unconventional ways and that’s how I created the [brand] language of Vaishali S.”

À La Mode

In 2018, the brand’s principal advisor and director, Alessandro Giuliani, saw her work and declared it couture. Encouraged, she applied for a spot at Paris Haute Couture Week. The selection process is notoriously rigorous; she didn’t expect to hear back.

Then came 2020. En route to Europe, she contracted a severe case of Covid-19 and found herself quarantined in the Maldives. On her birthday — April 29 — the call came: she had been selected as a guest member.

With international travel collapsing and India under lockdown, her artisans stranded in their villages, Shadangule gathered a small team and moved into her store after testing negative for the virus. Weak and recovering, she helped create an entire couture collection in six weeks. When travel routes reopened in fragments, she navigated a labyrinthine journey through multiple European countries before finally reaching Paris a day before the show.

“It was very filmy,” she says with a laugh. “I went alone with seven bags and customs was furious. I signed so many papers, and then cried because they were threatening me, saying I’d go to jail.”

The show went on but also led to a bunch of copies cropping up in the market.

“Two stores in the Middle East sell Vaishali S copies,” she says, shaking her head. “Initially I used to send them a notice, but how much can we do? Even in India many designers are doing it. With one or two I tried [fighting it] but they have a stronger marketing team.”

Show Stoppers

In 2021, she invited content creator Masoom Minawala to walk her runway — marking the first time a content creator walked at Milan Fashion Week.

“Her team approached us,” Shadangule recollects. “I was not in favour of doing the showstopper thing, but she was very keen to walk as [one]. So, I said, why not?”

Despite making the exception then, she resists the now near-mandatory culture of celebrity casting. “When you work with handlooms, you’re already handling many challenges, and the financial numbers are not high. We have to calculate our budgets — and having celebrities on the ramp [can be too expensive].”

Her 25th anniversary show returned her focus home — to her clothes and Mumbai’s historic Asiatic Society of Mumbai building. Securing permissions for the iconic site was a bureaucratic marathon. Yet its symbolism was irresistible: a monument preserving Indian culture, situated between her store and workshop, and housing rare literary treasures including early copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“It preserves culture,” says Giuliani. “And that’s what she does with textiles.”

He continues, “It is also halfway between this store and [Vaishali’s] workshop, so she passes by it every single day.”

Set in Store

If there is a through-line in Shadangule’s work, it is reverence for what is broken and overlooked. Her Kintsugi-inspired collection — named after the Japanese art of repairing pottery with gold — emerged from years of collecting broken shells on beaches. She was struck by how the same water that forms a shell can also fracture it, revealing an even more luminous interior. The metaphor extended naturally to human experience: fractures filled with resilience and memory.

The theme echoes in her current concept, ‘Inscriptions’, which draws from India’s ritual relationship with doors. In many traditions, doors mark thresholds — housewarmings, weddings, transitions. By incorporating salvaged doors into her store’s architecture, she literalises the symbolism.

Her first store in Mumbai opened with a modest bank loan of ₹50,000, measured just 100 square feet in suburban Malad. A grocery store flanked one side, a Chinese eatery the other.

Inside, she sold corsets and spoke passionately about Chanderi weaves to anyone who would listen. “I really go with the flow,” she says, her journey a statement to the discipline required to sustain thousands of artisans and a couture calendar across continents.Celebrities wearing her designs may amplify her brand. Paris may validate it. But at its heart, Shadangule’s collection remains what it began as: a conversation between loom and wearer, between past and future, between what was broken and what can still be remade.

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