June 01, 2025

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Rise like a Phoenix

There are times when profound experiences make for the toughest retellings, especially when you have been tasked with writing down someone's journey of trauma and healing. Much contrary to the breezy telephonic conversation two days before the cover shoot with the poet and performer, Navkirat Sodhi, my initial struggle to put it into words without either making her sound heroic or desensitising her experience, rattles me. It takes me a couple of days to finally put the dilemma to rest when I start addressing her as`Navki'(as she is referred to by her friends) in the story instead of `Sodhi'. I still can't comprehend how it exactly puts my perpetually overthinking mind at ease, but all of a sudden she feels more `human'. Words, they say, work in mysterious ways"Taller than you,your mind.Smaller than you,your pain.Corrupt your soul to believe you stand only to gain…"-- When Navki breathes life into these lines from her poem for Gaurav Gupta's S/S '25 collection showcase at Paris CoutureWeek earlier in January, you could see her quiet resilience making way through the packed rows, who were as awestruck as the rest of us watching the video online. As Gupta's show notes reads `Caught in the fire and reborn in the light',Navki glides through the oration barefoot, dressed in white, symbolic of rebirthHer journey is beyond inspirational--the stuff we read in books or watch in films. Navki refers to it as `rebirth'--a life-altering fire accident last year that has changed her worldly views. "Literally and metaphorically, a lot of issues like anger, frustration, discontentment--all of that got scorched along with my older self or older body," she tells me. Certain things that would irritate her in the past, don't anymore."When it comes to the body,it's been very ironic because earlier I used to feel like I needed something or the other to be perfect--it has to be a certain weight or shape.And now, when I landed in the ICU, the only thing that was working was a little bit of movement in my toes,and that's when you realise we already have so much.We just try to, kind of in a futile way, chase perfection, which is somebody else's idea. Somewhere, we lose track of what we already have is more than perfect, or more than we could ever imagine or ask for." It was about six weeks before the show, and Navki had barely started walking around, when Gupta, with whom she shares a spiritual bond that defies logic,told her to be a part of the show. That's the moment when it sparked something in Navki to make her feel relevant again. "I had gone into a bubble dealing with surgeries, doctors, and healing in general. It almost seems like you've been cut off from the world.The only thing I was able to write at that point was my experience.When you're coming out of something like this, your imagination doesn't work because reality has hit you so hard that you can only speak from the heart.You don't need to imagine or conjure things. It's physical." Normally, her writing process is very fluid."But this poem took almost a month to edit and be able to consciously share my feelings," she shares. Navki didn't want it to be overbearing in the sense of adding to whatever already exists in terms of grief."Even at that point,I didn't look at it from the context of being inspiring; it was just my experience." Poetry and fashion have always been her spirited armours. Navki's belief in both fields has only become stronger, in a more reassuring way.She describes herself as ephemeral, rescuing, and liberating as poetry and fashion are. "Both of them are riled with a lot of struggles of the heart and of the body, both of them are very tough yet very liberating.And if it wasn't for fashion, I don't think I would have come out of this [the incident] so beautifully..." In the hospital, she learnt of cases where people went into depression because their bodies had altered, and they weren't loving themselves the same way. "In my life, fashion and poetry held me up, they became the pillars to say that `you are even more okay than you were before'.So,if they were my pillars earlier, now they have become my wings." The path of healing, physically and spiritually, is never a linear one. No two days look or feel the same. But Navki sees it less as fatigue, and more as her `now project'."I am extremely grateful that I have this to do..." She goes on to tell me how, in the earlier stages of her recovery, while she was still immobile, she would feel these weird electric sensations in her legs."I can't explain...it felt like a billion ants crawling up my legs, and I couldn't move. I spoke to my yoga teacher about it, and she said `you should be thankful you have the legs to feel these sensations'." Gupta would defy the hospital rules and play music for her in the ICU, a mix of things she liked, meditative and instrumental."When you're in such a vibrational zone, because none of your body parts are working, you're able to connect to tunes and instruments very fast. My yoga teacher, who was in Spain, flew down to be with me.I also had sessions with a healer who helped me get out

The Opposite of Excess

Marco Polo didn't go to China in search of cheap tricks,” says Kavita Parmar, designer and founder of XTANT. “He went to discover the best of China. Its culture, traditions, goods that spoke of the hands that make there.” Indeed, we've always understood the value of exchanging knowledge and goods across borders. Parmar isn't interested in nostalgia or soft-focus ideas of tradition. She's interested in systems and in rewriting them. And so she founded XTANT, the Mallorca-based gathering of crafts-focused people, in 2019, as a destination where selling didn't feel like being a sell-out, but rather as feedback that your work was of value. Held every May in Palma at Palau Can Vivot, Spain, it is part salon, part school, part slow-burning revolution. XTANT brings together textile designers, weavers, farmers, artists, dyers, and philosophers. There are no glossy stalls, sales pitches, or tiered booths. It takes its name from the word 'extant', meaning that which is still in existence, not destroyed or lost. In that sense, it is a sacred spot, where retail follows only once knowledge has been exchanged. Parmar, who had previously run her own brand in Madrid, understands the specific issues that arise with a good product sans a proper platform. And how retail ambitions ruin the 'why' of conscious brands—a problem plaguing many slow Indian fashion brands. NAMES TO KNOW That approach breaks the grammar of most fashion-adjacent events, where hierarchy, visibility, and retail potential dominate. At XTANT, a Kutch block printing artisan is seen in conversation with a Parisian curator. A Hiroshima-based dancer-calligrapher sells salt from her ancestral land next to a Hungarian artisan who has revived a dying indigo tradition. Naturally, where there is conversation about craft, there is India. A flock of craft-committed Indian brands like Adiv Pure Nature, Injiri, Raw Mango, Kashmir Loom, and 11.11 have previously showcased here. This year, it featured names like Rasleela Textiles, Karishma Shahani Khan's Ka-Sha, Anuj Sharma's quirky Button Masala, Ladakh-based Namza Couture, along with young brands like 23n69e, Quarter, and Boito. But it's the unique confluence of Indian and global names that creates a distinct ecosystem. For instance, Boito's Odisha ikats stand side by side with Aleksandra Viktor's Uzbekistan ikats, or Claudia Mendoza's botanical printing and hand-woven Merino wool next to blockprinted pieces from Ajrakhpur in Gujarat. There's rigour, not spectacle. But, sometimes there is both. Indian designer Karishma Shahani Khan, a returning participant, is a buzzy and popular name at the stalls. Her clients arrive dressed in pieces from previous collections. In traditional fashion spaces, wearing the same outfit may incite embarrassment, but at XTANT, it is a sign of shared values. “XTANT is the most discerning audience. I keep returning here not just because sales are good but because these connections to other crafts practitioners are precious,” says Khan. Today, it is hard to decipher who the products are from if labels and logos are off luxury brands, says Parmar. “An uninspired sameness has crept in,” she rues. The point of different brands was to learn different languages. Today, India's craft scene serves as an ethnographic museum. According to Parmar, Europe may offer the best of luxury brands, but Indian textiles are at a different skill, and the audience comes ready to learn, devour, and shop at this unique marketplace. INTENT AND ACTION A leadership programme runs right before the festival and includes creatives across spectrums. They walk through forests, debate capitalism, discuss Gandhian economics. There are no panels, only questions. Last summer, Parmar spent a considerable time with environmental activist Vandana Shiva, deepening her own engagement with ecological consciousness. “We've inherited so many bad habits,” Parmar says. “Unlearning is the need of the hour.” She talks about the burnout that comes with doing meaningful work in a system that rarely rewards it. Creative work is empowering, but also heartbreaking. For craft-focused brands, even more so—the creative process requires you to access the deepest recesses of your memories for inspiration, and then put in hours of backbreaking handwork, sometimes in collaboration with artisans, sometimes yourself. So XTANT serves as a reminder: Revolution takes time. It creates spaces where people can take a deep breath, refill their spirit, and go back into the cynical world knowing this other reality also exists. A DIFFERENT ROOM Parmar likens the movement to early Hollywood, when artists like Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe broke from the studio system to create United Artists. They didn't want to play by someone else's rules. XTANT is like that. It's not waiting for a seat at the table, it's building a different room. She hopes to bring the conversation to India later this year. “I want people in India to see that they're not alone in this good fight to keep crafts thriving,” she says. “That there's a global community working from the same principles. We're not building a counter-market. We're building a counterculture.”