Preserving India’s sought-after skilled trades requires some modern changes.

Block print is to India what pizza is to New York City, with option after option available on every street corner, says textile designer Shreya Shah. Growing up in Mumbai surrounded by textile handicraft, the Marigold Living founder looked to the sari-wearing women in her family, her mother and older sister, to hone her taste in the country’s finest hand weaves.

Admittedly discerning, her standards were—and remain—grounded in technique: Patterns must be printed using wooden blocks, not brass, and textiles have to be dried in the sun, not in an oven. Yet even with the traditional methods still in practice, Shah saw that it was the product itself that was in need of change. “Indian women are no longer wearing saris the way my mother’s generation did, so there’s been a big drop in the demand for what these weaving communities do,” she says. “You have to make the textiles modern without losing the identity or the technique. I want to preserve the rich Indian design heritage of colors, patterns and motifs by presenting them in a contemporary, fresh format.”

Marigold Living's textiles bring business to Indian weavers. Photo courtesy of Marigold Living.