Can Fashion Be A Feminist Act? Designing With Rural India

Amid the fashion industry's fast-changing trends, it's easy to overlook the hands that hold the needle, guide the loom, or mix natural dyes. Yet across rural India, for thousands of women, fashion is not just about garments; it is a means of survival, self-worth, and continuity. Fashion begins to echo feminism when it acknowledges the women behind the craft, those who embroider delicate motifs, and artists who pass down knowledge through generations.

Women in Fashion

Over the years, traditional skills such as weaving, tailoring, dyeing, and embroidery have emerged as powerful tools of economic and personal empowerment. Women once relegated to domestic spaces are now contributing meaningfully to household incomes, making financial decisions, and in many cases, leading micro-enterprises of their own.

Consider a small collective in Haryana that practices age-old block printing using natural dyes. What began as a livelihood activity has grown into a space of learning, leadership, and negotiation. The women here not only understand aesthetics and customer needs, but they also participate in co-design processes and work on equal terms with urban counterparts.

Fashion that engages with rural India must do so with humility, not hierarchy. The objective isn’t to “uplift,” but to listen, collaborate, and co-create.

Designing with rural women requires sensitivity to their lives, the rhythms of harvests, local festivals, school schedules, and caregiving responsibilities. Flexible timelines, locally sourced materials, and relationships built on mutual trust are the foundation of sustainable fashion.

A Feminist Approach to Fashion

True feminist fashion doesn’t romanticise rural artistry; it recognises its worth. It honours not just the craft, but the woman behind it, ensuring she is compensated fairly, acknowledged by name, and treated with the dignity she deserves.

When a woman repairs her roof, pays for her daughter’s education, or opens her first bank account through earnings from her craft, that is where the deeper meaning of fashion as feminism lives.

A feminist approach to fashion asks difficult but necessary questions:

• Who made this piece?
• Were they acknowledged?
• Did they have a say in how their work was represented?
• Was the process as ethical as the product appears?

The answers to these questions form the real fabric of change. It is stitched in silence, block-printed and woven into lives that rarely seek the spotlight, but deserve every bit of it.

Authored by Priyal Bhardwaj, General Secretary of BJP Mahila Morcha (Delhi Pradesh) and Founder of Sangini Saheli. Views expressed by the author are their own.