Why handmade is the new luxury
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I am writing while sipping a shot of mezcal from a tiny metal tumbler handpainted by Kashmiri artisans on enamel. The little cup has a deep indigo background with a bright pink dahlia painted on it.
The petals are edged with white borders and the flower sits in a halo of green leaves and stem. It cost me precisely ₹300, but it has the grace of an object touched by “thinking hands"—to borrow a phrase from the architect-author Juhani Pallasmaa. This past fortnight I’ve thought a lot about how we decorate and accessorise our homes and the role of accessibility.
Why do we buy what we buy? Convenience? Price? Desirability? Durability? Reasonably speaking, it is a combination of all those things, and perhaps for the first time since forever, we now have better access to variously made and designed products—the only catch is that we have to choose wisely. In my estimation, most of the population is still quite a way away from being able to easily access great quality simple designs at a reasonable price, but it does feel like the long march to that destination is just a little bit shorter. I was in Mumbai for India Design (ID) at the end of September, and some 10 days later in Bengaluru at the 15th edition of the Hundred Hands fair.
Two very different presentations of products and design in the country. Hundred Hands is described as “the festival of the handmade". While ID, the country’s oldest design fair, an initiative by Ogaan Media, made its debut in Mumbai.
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