The pieces I took to Taipei

I packed kǣli for Taipei in October 2021, one box of clothes built mostly from cloth that had begun life as somebody else's discards. Pre-loved denim from Colombo. Mill ends from textile factories that would otherwise have been incinerated. I had been collecting the cloth for months. The pieces were not new and were not meant to look new.

The Sinhala word kǣli means pieces. The collection was named for the fragments of cloth in the suitcase, but also for what those fragments stood in for pieces of cotton farms in one country, indigo from another, labour from a third, wash chemistry from a fourth. By the time a pair of jeans reaches a shop, it has already crossed more oceans than most people cross in a lifetime, and shed enough water and dye to fill a small reservoir.

I wanted to make the seams visible. Each join was between two histories. Each repair was a refusal to throw something away.

The Taiwan Fashion Design Award runs at Taipei Fashion Week. It is the oldest fashion competition in Asia and that year drew around 450 designers from eighteen countries. When kǣli was named the winner that day, I remember not quite believing what I had heard. It was, the organisers told me afterwards, the first time a South Asian designer had taken the prize.

I have thought a lot since then about what changes when a piece of cloth is recognised in a room like that. Nothing about the cloth itself. The garments in my suitcase had not gotten heavier or finer in the last hour. What changes is what feels possible, what you can let yourself try next.