Anuradha sees herself more as a revivalist of textile
crafts than as a 'fashion designer', simply because
the base of her designs are always traditional Indian
textiles and in her own small ways she contributes
towards their preservation.
Her label Noor came in to being four years ago, out
of her passion for handlooms and now retails from
Ogaan in New Delhi and Kolkata, Melange in Mumbai,
Ffolio in Bangalore, Madras and Cochin and her own
shop Noor in Ahmedabad.
She works mainly with hand woven natural fibre fabrics
and travels extensively in her search for the unusual
and beautiful. She works with master weavers and crafts
people in most textile centres, which range from Kalamkari
hand painters in Kalahasthi, Andhra Pradesh to Bandhani
karigars in Mundra. Her designs are timeless and are
very simply cut, as the focus is always on the textile,
the weave, the print, the craft.
Anuradha designs for a woman who has a finely tuned
sense of aesthetics, someone who is as committed and
passionate about things created by hand. Predictably,
she has a clientele from the fields of arts, theatre
and design. Being an ardent lover of Indian classical
music and kathak, she doesn't really mind her clothes
being labelled 'arty'. She prefers that her clothes
are worn by a selective few.
Every season, new collections are put together which
are usually based on a particular textile craft. Each
of these comes after months of intense travels and
experiments and with sheer ingenuity of her craftsmen.
Lately, the emphasis in her work has been on using
vegetable dyes in most craft traditions. With the
world waking up to the environment issues, these are
so much more relevant today.
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