What do chicken feet and heritage textiles have in common?

You’ll spot her in an Anjul Bhandari ivory kurta with an ek taar chikankari chiffon dupatta. Next in an Ilkal chandrakali sari with kasuti embroidery paired with a Sabyasachi guttapusalu necklace. Then in a Swati & Sunaina canary-yellow sari woven in the dampach technique from Varanasi. And in an archival all-black Gaurav Gupta replete with his signature sculptural drapes. Lavina Baldota’s personal wardrobe is an anthology of Indian slow fashion—it stretches from fashion legends like Rohit Khosla and the rarest of hyper-regional handwoven saris to emerging Indian brands like Injiri. Impeccable personal style aside, her wardrobe in many ways reflects what she gets so right as a textile revivalist, crafts crusader, and curator—innovative contemporary fashion, and textiles and crafts are not to be kept apart in competing silos. Instead, let it become a jugalbandi of slow fashion.

“I am a connector. I’m fortunate that I have friends who are India’s top designers today. I also work with grassroot artisans (and textile and crafts clusters). But who is there to connect them? So, I connect them,” she says. We’re seated on a bench carved into a sort of amphitheatre studded with palms and grass peeking out of the region’s signature granite boulders at the Cultural Industries Centre at Anegundi, Karnataka’s crafts village. Baldota is telling me about one of her most recent way of playing the ‘connector’—an extensive exhibit titled Pampa: Textiles of Karnataka, showcasing at the Mantapa Photo Gallery, a historical 17th-century site set against the backdrop of the Virupaksha temple in Hampi.

The curatorial team includes Baldota and Mayank Mansingh Kaul (who has been behind most of the major textile exhibits in India—this year the list includes Surface in Jodhpur, Pehchaan at the National Museum in Delhi, and Textiles of Bengal in Kolkata) along with weaver and textile designer Pragati Mathur, artist-designer Nupur Saxena and designer Priya Saxena. “This exhibit has emerged from research and acquisition trips undertaken by the curatorial team over a year through the state,” adds Mansingh Kaul. It is the first educational survey and deep dive into the textiles of Karnataka.

Each region’s unique weaves are on display. You have saris from Ilkal, Lakkundi, Anekal, Rukmapur, Hubli, Molakalmuru, Gajendragarh, Udupi, Guledagudda, and so on. And there are kasuti embroideries, khadi dhotis and towels, kaudi quilts made by the Siddis, handspun sheep-wool blankets called kambli, and handwoven durries from Navalgund.

The textiles are speckled with stories that range from how menstrual blood inspires a crimson sari and how chicken feet find their way into embroideries made for poultry farming communities to the intricate painstaking craft of warp joining called kondi. But the show has a hybrid purpose—on one hand, it fills a massive gap in textile scholarship, on the other it helps revive and find a future for lost textiles.

What a fashion week is to designers (or is at least meant to be), these exhibits are to weavers, crafts clusters and revival projects. They are a way to showcase their work and for the marketplace to then kick in.

Baldota explains, “Take the example of the uniquely woven brocade sari we loaned from [sari collector] Uma Rao’s collection. The sari is a 150-year-old Molakalmuru weave and the only one of its kind that has been found so far. I saw it three times at her home in Bengaluru. Then slowly she was convinced; she had faith that I will do something good with it. Pragati and Nupur did an intense study of the sari (literally 2 mm x 2 mm). We then did a survey of the Molakalmuru region and found the weaver who would take up this challenge—master weaver DS Manjunath. He then travelled to examine the sari. Initially, he called very confident, saying it will be done. I then asked him to flip it over. He almost gave up then and there. But he still took it on and managed to recreate it!” This is the start of the revival process, the ability or skill to recreate an archival find. What comes next is where it gets even more exciting. “As more people see the recreation, he will get some orders. And then, hopefully, it will pick up, trickle across, and spread.”

Baldota does not get involved in the transactions; her involvement stops at making the connections. These exhibits name all makers and weavers involved so potential customers and brands can reach out directly. “My grandfather [-in-law], who had the great opportunity to work with Mahatma Gandhi, taught me a lot. He used to always say, ‘You are a custodian, you’re not an owner,’ and that’s how the whole idea of trusteeship came about. Our job is to serve the community,” she adds.

The late Abheraj Hirachand Baldota was a freedom fighter and associate of Gandhi during the freedom struggle, and the founder and chairperson of the Baldota Group, which has interests in mining, wind power, shipping, aviation, and more. His namesake foundation supports education, health, and environment initiatives alongside arts, culture, textiles, and handicrafts in Karnataka. The exhibit and other revival efforts are all part of the Foundation’s programming, which are overseen by Lavina Baldota now. Her mission is ambitious and the benchmark high for a revival to be successful, she explains. “It has to become robust. If in 10 years any of my projects or regions require me, I have failed. What we revive has to find a life of its own.”

Baldota is committed to her cause; she even measures her life in textiles. Her childhood in Mumbai is marked by her cutting up her mother’s handwoven cotton checked towels into dresses for herself. Her early adulthood was spent studying design in the US, where her appreciation only grew. (“Textile is the base of all design.”) She returned to India and designed her own collection using all-natural fabrics. At her wedding she was gifted handwoven saris from every region in India. “My mum and aunts told me the stories behind each and every one.”

She moved to Hospet in Karnataka and started spending time with the weavers. Soon, design was swapped for the Foundation, and her work was laid out for her—to play connector and custodian to the textile communities through revival projects, exhibitions and the other textile initiatives. She says, “There’s so much to do… my God, it’s overwhelming. Every trip you find something new—a textile or a craft or a weave—and then it’s gone. There’s an urgency, and we cannot get complacent. A few more years, and we may not even have that information or sample that will help us revive it.”

If we think couture is rare, these exhibits dabble in the extinct or the endangered, history brought back through a contemporary master weaver’s vision. Their future is then left to the market forces of collectors, customers, design houses and brands. While some Indian crafts and textiles thrive, most have been diluted or have disappeared completely.

But Baldota has a simple formula that helps her decide which are worth reviving and which are best left to the annals of history. “Two things contribute to the deciding factor of what should and can be taken forward. One is the nature of the yarn. If I see that the yarn has gone in a very different direction to be brought back, then the beauty will be lost. We have to be able to add value to it, not take away from it. The second is that revival always needs to be done at the highest or the most modest levels of textiles.” This means fine luxury textiles on one end, and the more everyday utilitarian textiles on the other. She continues, “I do a mix of both, because it has to be a balance. In Karnataka, we lean more towards everyday textiles.”

Next, she wants to take Pampa to the weavers. She has imagined a travelling bus-style exhibit that spends three days across various clusters and villages. Baldota is also keen on getting back to work and discovering more lost textiles for the generations to come. She insists that Gen Z will save textiles: “Look at young kids today; they are drawn to slow fashion. They love the handcrafted and the artisanal, be it embroideries or textiles. They’re getting more and more mindful of it. We are seeing a resurgence, and I think we’re in a very good space right now.”

Pampa: Textiles of Karnataka is on till March 10 at the Mantapa Photo Gallery in Hampi