Bhubaneswar/Mumbai: Hailing from Barpali, 22-year-old Bidyabati Meher clad in an Ikat jacket designed and stitched by her, walked the ramp at Lakme Fashion Week (LFW) Winter-Festive 2018, a five-day extravaganza, in Mumbai representing Odisha handloom as the future of modern fashion.
She walked along with other members of Digital Empowerment Foundation, an NGO imparting digital knowledge among the weavers of Barpali and Nuapatna. “Designers from Delhi came to our cluster and we came up with the designs to be presented at the fashion week,” she said.
Bidyabati has been working for the NGO, in an attempt to change certain traditional works of Barpali, while Sabyasachi Patra works in Nuapatna and Utkarsh Rajwant guides the same in Barbanki. “It mostly includes motifs and layout giving it a contemporary twist. The most important aspect, however, is to digitize the process under the initiative Digikargha,” she added.
A student of digital literacy, she later trained in software. “I started working on it after completing my studies and I enjoy doing it,” said the young techie.
The products were all made in Barpali, but given a new look with other designers who they collaborated with. They presented ‘Artisans of Digital Age’ featuring ‘Indigene x Barpali and Nuapatna, Naushad Ali x Musiri and Three by Pallavi Dhyani x Barabanki’ on day two.
She, along with some others, has been giving digital training like understanding and implementing a software that the weavers can use to bring sustainable growth to their livelihood. “The weavers were earlier working with handmade graph designs, traditional motifs and traditional process. Now, they are working with digital graphs i.e. graphs and its layouts made on a computer,” she said.
Kishor Meher, Dhaneswar Meher, and Karuna Meher were the weavers involved in the making of the fabrics represented at the LFW. The weavers, she said, mainly depend on the local market or master weavers for selling their products. “Now we are trying to connect them with this type of platform,” she added.
Having been working on this for the last two years, she said the real challenge was convincing the weavers and bring them to coordinate. “Finally, we are now working with some weavers in our digital process. They have started to show interest and are putting in a lot of energy in their work,” she said.
