The future of Indian craftsmanship through Shani Himanshu's indigo lens

Once you experience something and realise that it is the right way, it gives you even more motivation to achieve it properly. Rather than treating it as a challenge, it simply becomes part of the process,” says Shani Himanshu, co-founder of 11.11/eleven eleven. It’s this passion, harnessed with respect for craft, community, and craftsmanship, that sits at the very core of the label. The brand consistently blurs geographic and gendered lines by re-engineering heritage techniques for handspun, handwoven textiles and integrating diverse components of resist dyeing, hand painting, and quilting, using indigenous cotton and 100 per cent natural dyes. The mention of ‘indigo’ each time brings a hint of a smile or a raised eyebrow on Himanshu’s otherwise serious face. The knowledge can hardly be refuted once he starts talking about his journey and lessons with the brand.

“Mia (Korikawa) and I have been part of all the creative and design aspects of it. This journey has had many milestones and anchor points that we placed over time. Working with Indian craft practices became 100 per cent part of our DNA as we transitioned from using materials sourced from Italy or influenced by Italian materials to making everything 100 per cent in India.” It was around 2014 that Himanshu and Korikawa took a stance on working only with natural dyes, which proved to be a game changer. “For the brand to sustain and grow, we had to learn about natural dyes, understand the country’s ecosystem, identify the right people, and work with them.” It raised questions about consistency and scalability, which the duo had to address by bringing a system design in place and training the artisans along the way. “These learnings took almost a decade. We spent that time refining the value chain, identifying loopholes, understanding the issues, and working to bridge those gaps to build a consistent system in which we could produce. It was constant back and forth. Many things had no answers because people simply didn’t know. But we decided to stick with natural dyes and do it 100 per cent.”

 

The designer pauses to bring us spiced herbal tea and points out its benefits for beating the scorching heat of June as we sit on a patchwork-upholstered couch at his Okhla-based workshop and design studio in Delhi. The space echoes the collective curiosity and the label’s mainstay in finding simple solutions. It’s omnipresent— from terracotta vats with a capacity of holding almost 5,000 litres of natural indigo dye and wooden furniture to dyed textiles used as wall tapestries, books stacked up, suspended racks for clothes that highlight the breathability and flow of easy silhouettes, or beakers with dried-up indigo residue on display.

Comprehending indigo’s historical and cultural context, identifying the right people to work with it, and taking it to the next level have been equal parts challenging and rewarding for Himanshu. “People believed that natural dyes rub off, require too much care, or do not last long. This was a completely wrong notion. Many chemical dyes still bleed initially, even today. But as a customer, you may never notice because the garment may have been washed

before you buy it, or you only discover it later if something falls on it or when you wash it yourself,” he educates us. However, chemical dyes generally do not have a dry-rub issue, whereas natural dyes often do. “So, customers discovered these problems while wearing the garment, which became a much larger issue for a brand working with natural dyes.” It led the team to start an extensive R&D process almost five years ago, and the result has been revolutionary. “We had identified a problem and solved it, but now we needed to understand how to scale that solution and transfer this knowledge to artisans.”

A small-scale dyer working in a rural area usually discards the dyeing waste nearby. There may not be propersewage systems, so it often flows directly into rivers or the land. On the contrary, larger companies may have proper sewage treatment systems, whereas smaller companies often do not, as such systems require significant investment. “That made it even more important for us not to work with chemical dyes.” Natural dye water contains nitrogen and other components that can be reused in multiple ways. For example, in addition to recycling the water itself for farming, the dye material can also be separated and recycled for many more dyeing batches. “It became a beautiful story because we started thinking about how to make the entire process into a system. Imagine a process (indigo dyeing) surviving for 6,000 years without changing; that’s insane.” Raw materials and processes need to adapt to today’s context, as the weather, demands, requirements, and products have evolved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a 16-year-old brand, classics become the mainstay of every collection at 11.11/eleven eleven. “You keep refining them and reintroducing them based on the new textiles you’ve developed, and they become your core. There is a mainline collection where the new ideation happens, bringing it to the print side of the development,” the designer adds. Take, for instance, artwork interventions could be hand-painted, block-printed, screen-printed, or involve a different kind of shibori work. These ideas will be based on a larger story at hand, working around certain seasons. The inspirations for Himanshu stem from different

places and have never been guided by trends. “It is something you would have come across today or in the past, or something you have been R&D-ing and are now able to implement practically. So, there will be various answers to it, which you start to see on your larger design board as things come together,” he explains. The process transitions to styling the collection and answering pertinent questions about decision-making, weighing data points, and taking customer reviews into account.

When the common purview leans on the constant demand for innovation, would one like to come up with a new craft every year or every season? “Our limitation stands between natural dye and hand-spun yarn. Ninety per cent of the artisans walk away because they are unable to handle the hand-spun yarn, or we will have to dye it and give it to them. So, then the full understanding is that somebody doing an ikat in Telangana, in a warp which is a complete 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 metres of warp, will have to travel back there, where it is dyed, and then again go back there because not many people are doing it.”And if they are using natural dyes, they still haven’t found solutions to the problems the brand has solved. “You have to do workshops to teach them.” That is something the designer has been working on for some time and wishes to scale it further. “We have set up a producer organisation called Kala Khoj in Kutch’s Khambra village, which is an artisan-owned organisation. A lot of the knowledge that we have learned, we are partnering with them on.” This initiative is centred on systemic changes to enable artisans to scale profits by applying their knowledge to other brands or projects as well.

"The label integrates sustainable value chain practices and provides supply chain transparency through unique initiatives, such as Meet the Makers."

In addition, the label integrates sustainable value chain practices and provides supply chain transparency through unique initiatives such as Meet the Makers. The idea is to connect the world to their artisans using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, which records data at the source, including the people, processes, and materials involved. Each garment comes with a unique code integrated into an NFC chip, concealed in creative ways, such as inserted in a crochet button. A gentle tap on the button with a phone would display a ‘Meet the Maker’ link on the website product page to reveal the artisans involved in creating the particular product. The makers are also assigned unique signatures, such as flowers, the sun, and more, to create a deeper sense of product ownership.

To understand ‘innovation’ better at 11.11/eleven eleven, one has to dig deeper into purpose, responsibility, and reasoning. Denim has a negative track record regarding ecological impact due to water pollution. The label celebrates handspun, handwoven denim made from indigenous kala cotton and dyed with 100 per cent natural dyes. “India was producing more than 1 billion metres of machine-made denim. But there was nothing Indian about it. And you are competing with China and other countries to make it cheaper. Then there’s this enhanced denim, rooted in India and made with indigenous cotton.” The label relies on system design, R&D, and engineering-led solutions to refine their finished products. For example, the designer has been working with his team on a process to naturally remove indigo from the pocket linings of denim and trousers. The removed pigments can be converted into a paste or stored for later reuse. “You can remove it, reuse it, and continue doing that repeatedly—not just once. These are some of the discoveries that are helping us move forward.” Additionally, the team’s endeavour to expand the dye’s creative scope has led to the development of indigo pastes for painting or printing. A patent is in process for the same.

Despite being available through multiple stockists internationally across Europe, Canada, the US, and Asia, Himanshu feels the Indian contemporary wear category has barely scratched the surface. “You will have to take a step back to understand India’s history and how these textiles came to be.” Innovation was possible because the use of textiles was beyond drapes—saris, dhotis, and lungis—and later on, a little bit of scarves. “But sari and lungis are where your handloom clusters are, and that’s where it ends. Now, if you are making a garment out of it, it will never work. You will always have a problem. If you don’t engineer it, you will fail,” Himanshu breaks it down. So, for any younger brand stepping into it, re-engineering becomes the first step—to make a product that is not for a sari but a garment. “In our case, it starts with working with indigenous cotton and expanding its scope. The beautiful part is that, as a designer, you are not limited and have more potential to play,” he concludes.

This article originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar India's June-July 2026 print issue.

Photographs by Tongpangnuba Longchari

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