The IKKIVI Podcast: Exploring Fashion, Culture and Values · Nivi Murthy

S4E04: This Denim School is Revolutionising Fashion Education in India | Sukhraj Singh

·57 min·3 clips

Sukraj Singh calls denim “the most polluting” part of fashion and links it to cotton, dyeing, and finishing.

Design begins before the sketch. The speaker treats sustainability as the first condition of design, especially when design is meant to solve a problem. Sales matter, but they cannot be the whole brief. If a designer only answers what people already know how to ask for, the work gets smaller before it even starts. The school answers that with a soil-to-soil curriculum. Students follow a product through making, use, its life after use, and discard. That is where the episode gets its weight. A thing that may sit for 250 years after use cannot be cut loose from the person who imagined it. So teaching has to slow down. Students need enough depth, and enough feeling, to treat process as more than a technical checklist. Values come before operations here. He remembers teachers and mentors who left him with simple, demanding rules, including Stefano's push to keep the process simple. Simplicity is not treated like a soft aesthetic choice. It means fewer manipulations, fewer complications, and a cleaner relationship to fabric. Responsible design starts looking less dramatic, maybe, but more honest. Another question keeps tugging at the conversation. Yunus Kimani's idea of looking beyond bread and butter values pushes him toward moral values and creative work that can hold up over time. Beauty is not neutral in this episode. Designers are asked to think about whether they are making with care, or just adding more objects to a world already carrying the effects. The school also moves outside the usual classroom frame. He describes leaving the city for the Himalayas so students could meet design through nature, distance, and a slower rhythm of attention. The ending stays gentle: commitment, choice, and the small inward shifts that make education feel less like a system and more like practice.

As heard by us

A values-led case for teaching design as responsibility, not just production.

This conversation treats design education as an ethical practice as much as a curriculum. It returns to the idea that design should solve a problem, and that students should follow a product through from first making to post-consumer use.

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Why you'd press play

You want fashion talk that starts in the classroom and ends with responsibility.

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