Vastra Chakra is an innovative online program in the field of sustainable fashion that trains village women in tailoring with upcycled cloth. The project seeks to instill creativity in impoverished women by providing them with ideas to reuse available resources.
Phase one was successfully completed in 2021 in villages in eight states of India: Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, and Punjab. With much of rural India still affected by COVID, we formulated an innovative online training program. The tailoring project supports skill development for village women in the field of sustainable fashion. Named Vastra Chakra, a Sanskrit term that literally translates to clothing wheel, the initiative carries the overall goal of empowering rural women through upcycling used clothing into products of a higher value.
Upcycling is a process that is accessible for both small and large scale production. It is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products perceived to be of greater quality, such as artistic value or environmental value.
Based on these concepts, the Vastra Chakra program focuses on creating awareness about textile waste management as a step in the conservation of nature. Alongside, it seeks to instill creativity in the village women by providing them with ideas to reuse things like their old saris, shirts, pants, and jeans into new clothing items or home textile products.
