Why We Make Two Collections a Year, Not Four

The fashion calendar asks for four collections a year, and increasingly for eight. We make two. This is not a stylistic position or a claim about slowness as a virtue; it is arithmetic. A bridal lehenga with full zardozi takes one karigar and four assistants somewhere between eight and nine hundred hours. There are two hundred and forty people on our roll. If you divide the second number into the first often enough, you arrive at two collections a year, and no amount of ambition changes the sum.

What changes if you insist on four is not the calendar. It is the embroidery. The first thing to go is the density — a panel that carried nine motifs carries five. Then the thread changes, because real silver-gilt zari costs what it costs and a metallised polyester does not. Then the frame time shortens, and the tension across the silk goes uneven, and the fabric puckers when it comes off the adda. By the time a house is producing eight collections a year, the hand has been removed from the process entirely and what remains is a photograph of handwork.

The honest counter-argument is that two collections a year means less choice and longer waits, and both of those are true. A bride who comes to us in September for a December wedding is going to hear no, or is going to hear a proposal built around what is already on the floor. We lose that commission perhaps a third of the time. We have decided that is the cost of the position rather than a problem to be solved.

There is a second-order effect that took us some years to notice. When a karigar has enough time on a piece, he starts making decisions on it — moving a motif half a centimetre because the drape falls differently on this particular silk, adding a repeat where the eye needs one. Those decisions are invisible individually and they are the whole difference collectively. A rushed piece is not a worse version of the same garment. It is a different object, and everyone who handles both can tell.