With so much at stake in the fashion scene, the founder and executive chairman of Aranya Crafts Ltd, Ruby Ghuznavi breaks it down for us and tells us what needs to be done to make the industry more viable. The honorary member of the World Crafts Council (Asia Pacific Region) and vice president of National Crafts Council of Bangladesh, talks about our stance in the current market.
What is the current climate like for our local fashion brands/designers? Right now our stance as designers is very weak, with very little knowledge and training on the subject matter. We are self-made designers who haven’t been exposed to the right kind of training and education. We need to do a lot more with our fabrics and we need our own people to like our fabrics. But that becomes a problem because our weavers are resistant to change. They prefer to remain with what they are used to. If they are presented with a new idea, they are not very receptive. They don’t want to experiment. But in India if their designers come up with a new concept that hasn’t been tried or tested before, the weavers will replicate it right away. They are aware of the fact that in a contemporary market you have to evolve and keep introducing new texture, patterns and designs without losing your traditional touch.
How is the market different than 10 years ago? For the longest time, people would grieve over the fact that many of our students who go overseas for higher studies, choose to settle there. It is unfair. They went there to study because their country gave them the resource to in the first place, so they owed it to the country. But lately, that’s something that has changed. A lot of people are coming back after graduation and trying to do something good for the country. And a lot of people who have access to international fashion are wearing our clothes. That has probably been our biggest gain over the last few years.
Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, we are selling far more handloom fabrics to the younger generation, so the handloom sector has been growing. Earlier, we wore whatever was available in the market, but now there’s a lot to choose from. The younger generation is much more fashion conscious yet they choose to pick a traditional piece over those popular fads which aren’t here to stay anyway. Not to say that there isn’t any demand for those type of products, there’s obviously a niche market for them but our younger generation prefer traditional styles which are updated and in sync with the current tastes.
Tell us a bit more about the Crafts Council and what it does At the National Crafts Council, besides workshops, we are constantly working towards product development and design. We try to provide marketing support for individual craftspeople and community.
Previously, most crafts were meant for the rural market. In the past, people would use clay pots for cooking or pitchers for storing water. Today in the urban areas they have been replaced by a fridge and stainless steel utensils. So we now have to find alternative products for the potter so that their traditional skills are not wiped out. That is where product development comes in; we have to find contemporary uses for traditional crafts. You’ll see a lot of roadside vendors selling clay planters and vases, which have been developed by members of the Council.
How does the Council help promote our local artisans? Every year, we give awards to our artisans for outstanding performance. Through these awards, the Crafts Council tries to make them value their own skills. Unless you give them the honour and recognition that they deserve, they won’t value themselves. They think desk jobs are way better. Yes it is a lot easier to do a desk job compared to say, weaving that requires you to work painstakingly for a sari for very low returns at the end of the day. But these are talents and skills that build up the backbone of a society that we can’t do without. They are not any less important. We also try to give our local artisans exposure by sending their products to international competitions. Several of our craftspeople have got awards on an international level. This year, there was a competition in China where over a 100 countries participated and our jamdani weaver got an award. That says a lot about our weavers.
Jamdani is ours but for the longest time India has been trying to register it as theirs. Where are we on the jamdani dispute at the moment? India has registered Uppada Jamdani as theirs. But historically and even in the present time, jamdani belongs to Bangladesh. There is a book titled “Dhakai Jamdani” and we have been fighting against that for a while now. Jamdani is ours, how can you label it as Dhakai or Tangail? We invested a lot of time and effort for the government to enact the GI law to regain what is rightfully ours – jamdani, our textile heritage. The rules are still being worked on and only after that can we apply to register it as ours.
How is it that foreign fashion brands that mostly operate online have a solid foothold in the market over our local brands that have outlets scattered across the country? To begin with, if we allow Indian TV serials to dictate our sense of styling, we’ll be in the middle of nowhere. The argument is that people want those clothes. People may want drugs but are you going to give it to them? For years, the National Crafts Council of Bangladesh has been working to influence the taste of the younger generation. Because you can be equally glamorous and well-dressed in our local fashion wear, without having to put on those glitzy clothes that does not represent our taste or tradition in any way.
Frankly I don’t know how so much foreign clothes are allowed to come into the country. Why are these products allowed to flood our market? Interestingly enough, this one time when Aarong decided to open up a branch in India, there were so many formalities that they backed off. If Aarong can’t do it, I certainly can’t do it. Yet Vasavi, Manyavar and whatnots have all entered our market. How did they manage to do so? Because they’ve cut corners and our government has not been as strict as theirs. If they actually paid all the duties, which they probably don’t, it would be just as competitive for them to survive in our market.
Do we have a survival strategy? Crafts are surviving very well in Bangladesh, but we cannot move forward without intensive government support. Only then, can we grow.
What kind of government support do you think would benefit us? Did you know that in many countries the government either urged or made it mandatory for all their central offices to use craft products like waste baskets, trays, folders, etc. I recently read somewhere that in one Indian State, officials and other staff members are encouraged to wear khadi to work. Had we been given similar kind of support from our government, can you imagine the kind of demand for our crafts that would be created? Craftspeople in Bangladesh are very resourceful and committed but if we don’t invest in them, we will lose them.
One of the biggest challenges here is that our government doesn’t take crafts too seriously, despite the fact that after agriculture, it is the second largest employer in Bangladesh. Yet there’s no government policy proactively supporting crafts.
Like I mentioned earlier, we often wail about the fact that many students go abroad to pursue higher education and decide to stay back. But most people are not even aware of the fact that our craftspeople such as weavers, potters and others quit and travel all the way to Dhaka to pull rickshaws or to break bricks, because their products do not have enough demand. To say the least, it is a waste of skills and talent.
How can we have a more competitive edge over our neighbouring contenders? First and foremost, we need to have at least one proper design institute in the country. BGMEA has one, but it’s not enough. Unfortunately, most of the teachers in our design schools today are not fashion designers themselves. Maybe except only for one or two, I don’t think anybody else has actually obtained a degree in fashion designing. I can’t be a dentist unless I’m trained for it. In the same manner I cannot be a fashion designer or a teacher unless I’ve gone through training. You have to have the knowledge of things such as pattern cutting or understanding fabrics. You have to be able to tell how the dress will look if it’s draped from different angles. These are not things you or I would know without being exposed to the right kind of education.
Most of our neighbouring countries, including Thailand, India or even Sri Lanka have really good institutes for fashion designing. I think we’ll benefit a lot by attending any of those institutes, until we have that dream school of our own that we’re direly in need of in Bangladesh. Attending NID or NIFT in India or the fashion institutes in Sri lanka or Thailand would immensely help us. We have the same cultural ethos. Therefore, learning from them is not going to put us on a different track altogether