For Karigars: Kareena Kapoor and 100 Indian fashion designers to front Baradari Project

Pratishtha Rana

A power team of Kareena Kapoor Khan, Namrata Zakaria and Tina Tahiliani Parikh are getting together to launch an impactful initiative for the karigar community of India. Dearly referred to as Baradari (a term for brotherhood), this campaign aims to facilitate a conversation around the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on karigars – the backbone of the Indian fashion industry.

The Baradari project has the unprecedented participation of over 100 Indian designers to support their artisans. Designers Manish Malhotra, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Tarun Tahiliani, Rahul Mishra, Monisha Jaising, Masaba Gupta and Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla will donate some of their signature apparel for a digital sale.

Revealed: Satya Paul’s new Creative Director, Rajesh Pratap Singh’s plan to reinvent the brand

This will be hosted exclusively on Parikh’s multi-designer store Ensemble India’s newly launched e-commerce platform.

Turning the spotlight on the real creators of fashion – weavers embroiders and the handloom community – the fundraising sale will run for a week, from August 7 to August 15. All the proceeds and funds collected will be given to select artisan communities as a means to empower and enable them to become entrepreneurs.

In a conversation with LuxeBook, Parikh said that it was an immediate, unequivocal yes to Baradari, when Zakaria spoke to her about it a couple of months ago. “I strongly believe our designers would be nothing without our karigars. What makes India stand out in terms of art, craft and fashion is the range of handcraft skills present here” She added that the project went live in around 48 hours after Kareena Kapoor, too, said yes and extended her patronage to the craftsmen community.

Parikh feels lucky that Ensemble India, in its third month of online operations, is able to co-host an online fundraiser of this massive extent. “We have full plans to continue with this cause and will make this one of the pillars to stand on and to give back to the karigars.”

The one critical question raised by Zakaria, a reputed journalist with over 20 years of experience was how best the fashion fraternity can bridge the gap between an artisan and a designer. In a nutshell, Baradari is a one of its kind movement and its ultimate goal is to help and push the skilled labours of India to become thriving businessmen, a vision to expand the designer industry into a more economically sustainable one.

Actress Kareena Kapoor Khan wrote to her 3.7 million followers on Instagram, “Everyone knows I enjoy fashion. But I think it is time we begin to think of what responsible fashion is. When Namrata Zakaria asked me to be a part of Baradari, I agreed immediately. It’s a new conversation to have with fashion and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Read: Actress Radhika Apte gets candid about luxury, beauty and her guilty pleasures