How far would you travel to watch your next bespoke shirt being made?
Some craft-conscious customers will hop over to London to visit Budd or Turnbull & Asser. Others fly to Naples to observe Luca Avitabile and other Italian makers in action. But a select group, it turns out, will journey as far as Amritsar, a city in northwestern India, near the country's border with Pakistan.
“We get a lot of customers, actually. They like to come and see us,” says Varvara Jain, cofounder of 100Hands, the company she established with her husband, Akshat, in 2014. The couple previously worked in investment banking, but when Akshat began to crave a change from the corporate grind, he offered to take over a small shirtmaking workshop his family owned in Amritsar where six workers made clothes for friends and relatives. With Varvara's support—she leads sales and marketing—Akshat has transformed the company's shirts into a staple for tailoring cognoscenti, with an international reputation for quality and a staff that now runs to 385 members.
The Jains arefast-fashion industry, India has a rich history in the apparel trade, replete with fabric weaving, intricate embroidery, and hand-sewing. High-profile European designers including Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Dior have quietly relied on Indian craftspeople to produce some of their most complicated designs for decades. Today's bright young things are much more open about doing the same: Bode, the award-winning New York–based brand founded in 2016, is known for the patchwork jackets and embroidered pieces it makes in New Delhi. SMR Days, a U.K. operation started in 2020, is heralded not only for its commitment to sustainability but also for the complex (tie-dye) and (block printing)—both centuries-old Indian crafts—that give its airy shirts and trousers a distinct look.
