ELLE Weaves: QUOD’s Social Stitches Together Maheshwar’s Weaving Legacy And Today’s Modern Silhouettes

Some ideas arrive quietly, on riverbanks. For QUOD, the seed of its new collection, ‘Social,’ took shape during a boat ride along the Narmada in 2024. What began as a moment of reflection became a larger question: what if heritage wasn’t something to reference at the margins, but the very starting point of contemporary design?

That thought now finds form in ‘Social,’ a collaboration with WomenWeave in Maheshwar. Here, craft is not a backdrop; it’s the protagonist. The collection honours centuries of weaving traditions that trace back to Queen Ahilyabai Holkar, but brings them into the present through the brand’s own language of tailoring and silhouette.

The choice of material isn’t incidental. Cotton slivers sourced from Magan Sangrahalaya, Bhopal, are spun on the ambar charkha and woven on frame looms in Maheshwar, where artisans work with varying warp and weft counts to produce fabrics of different weights. No softening or finishing treatments are added; the slubs and natural irregularities remain visible. For this collection, QUOD developed three distinct khadi linens — striped off-white, earthy brown, and blue, each with its own density and fall.

For this collection, working with WomenWeave and local weavers, the design process was less about dictating and more about responding. The handwoven fabrics themselves shaped the silhouettes, hems, and finishes. “The fall of khadi linen, its stripes, slubs, and hand variations often are challenging,” says founder Ikshit Pande. “Each of these became a work in progress, shaping the final outcome.”

Adapting Signatures

Embroidery extends that dialogue. French knots, blanket stitch, cross stitch, and running stitch appear across the collection, forming motifs of wreaths, seahorses, and reimagined brand logos. One of the most striking examples is the ‘Sad Boyfriend Shirt,’ where a printed QUOD graphic is patiently reinterpreted entirely through hand embroidery — stitch by stitch, in multiple colours.

Translating QUOD’s signature silhouettes into khadi linen meant recalibration. The ‘CSM Shirt Dress’ and ‘Theatre Dress,’ for instance, had to be re-cut and mitered to accommodate the handloom’s stripes and the fabric’s looser fall. Instead of forcing structure, the brand found a middle ground with precision meeting imperfection.

A Living Heritage

For Ikshit Pande, 'Social' is about repositioning craft as part of everyday fashion imagination. “The legacy of Maheshwar, of WomenWeave and of every craft cluster, is the true original meaning of social,” he says. “It’s about coming together of people and ideas, not just intangible explorations online.”

In that sense, ‘Social’ is both fashion and framework: a collection that extends opportunity for artisans while reintroducing handwoven textiles as modern, versatile, and unapologetically relevant.

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