LataSita turns old sarees and fabrics from Durga Puja pandals into sustainable fashion

Mother’s wardrobe or Grandmother’s almirah is a treasure trove of handcrafted sarees. The fabric and the craftsmanship of these vintage pieces are beyond compare. This is what Meghna Nayak, a freelance journalist from Kolkata, realised, a decade ago, when she saw her mother sifting through her wardrobe. 

A particular heirloom saree, which her mother had inherited from Meghna’s grandmother, caught her eye.

“The saree was decades old but the kind of work done on it and the fabric were unmatched. It was nothing like the ones available today. When I looked inside the wardrobe, there were hundreds of such sarees that I had never seen my mother wear,” says Meghna.

This led Meghna to ponder over what could be done with the sarees that were not worn.

Genesis of LataSita

An idea sprung in Meghna’s mind and thus began LataSita, a design studio that upcycles old sarees in an attempt to create “zero-waste” and “ethically-produced” “classic” outfits for women and also preserve the country’s textile legacy. 

LataSita, which was started with Meghna’s savings of Rs 5 lakh, makes a variety of clothes such as jackets, kimonos, shrugs, kurtas, and dresses. 

Today there’s a lot of buzz around giving old clothes a new lease of life, backed by an environmental motive. But LataSita was started way back in 2012 when the concept was still new. 

Building the business

A decade ago, when Meghna started this business, ‘upcycling’ was a fancy term and a niche category with not many organised players. 

From 2012 to 2015, Meghna took baby steps to build a strong base for her business. She was also working as a freelance environment journalist alongside to sustain herself. 

“Everyone appreciated the idea, but there were superstitions attached to wearing someone else’s used clothes, which were making customers hesitant. While they loved recreating something from their own old sarees, it took me a lot of time to create awareness on the environmental benefits of wearing upcycled fabric,” recalls Meghna. 

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Repurposing old fabrics

Sarees from the wardrobes of women—used, gifted or unworn—are the main sources of LataSita’s clothes. In 2021, Meghna scouted for sarees that were used in Durga Puja pandals across Kolkata, thus repurposing tonnes of fabrics, which would have otherwise ended up as waste in landfills. 

LataSita offers two collections—pret and custom. The pret collection is an outcome of kilos of sarees sourced from weavers’ dead stock, Durga Puja pandals, wholesale markets, and the closets of women. The custom collection is created through the ‘Send Us Your Saree’ campaign. The campaign encourages customers to get their sarees transformed into bespoke pieces. 

“Thread, elastic, zip, hook, and button are new. Fixtures and lining are often upcycled. I negotiate this with women who have preconceived negative notions about ‘old’,” says Meghna. “My sources are generally the last place anyone would look at, as at this point textile is considered useless."

But it is precisely at this point that Meghna’s innovative streak comes alive. “The saree inspires me in endless ways. I look forward to exploring used saree as a raw material,” she says. 

Besides repurposing sarees, LataSita also dabbles with other fabrics. Recently the studio made sherwanis out of Tussar curtains. It also repurposed several old pairs of jeans that didn’t fit a customer anymore into denim jackets. 

Growth and challenges

LataSita receives 30-40 orders a month. The pret collection is focused on exhibitions, for which the studio makes 750 garments a year. Meghna has also taken her clothes to exhibitions in Taiwan, England, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands. 

The price of LataSita’s clothes varies between Rs 2,500 and Rs 25,000. Products in the Rs 3,000 to Rs 8,000 range are the best sellers.

In the last five to six years, brands such as I Was A Saree, Pitara, and Dooglage and international labels such as House of Wandering Silk and Bodements have emerged in the upcycled fashion segment. 

On the challenges in the space, Meghna says it takes time to upcycle a saree and one cannot replicate a design. “Each piece has to be worked with individually. Even if you create a pattern, the placement changes every time. A saree has a fixed width, bookended by borders, which should add to and not obstruct the design. There’s a huge amount of repairing, restoring, reviving, cleaning, and darning work involved,” she explains.

Meghna says that, since inception, the company has been running profitable. However, it faced a dip during the pandemic. But the entrepreneur is confident that this year her business will grow 25-30%, after the launch of a D2C website. 

A closed loop production chain

The best part about LataSita, according to Meghna, is that its process is transparent and it has a “closed-loop production chain”. Which means the customer knows exactly who made their clothes and they can personally come to the studio and see how the clothes are made. “The idea is to make people be highly engaged rather than mindlessly shop online,” says Meghna.

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Towards a sustainable future

According to Meghna, business owners talk about ‘profit’ and ‘loss’ only from the economic point of view. However, there is also profit and loss from the social and environmental perspectives, which are not considered. 

Workers in garment factories have to deal with unfair working conditions and low wages. Chemical dyes, huge amounts of wastes, and disruptive processes damage the environment. Businesses need to take into account these losses as well. Profit must go beyond economics; the net social and environmental gains also have to be considered, says Meghna. 

“I don’t want to become H&M or Zara because it’s hard to maintain the integrity of upcycling and also mass produce. I want to scale up the business but not at the cost of the environment. I like to use LataSita to start a conversation with my customers, many of whom have zero interest in environment and sustainability,” she says.