The founder
Jahnvi Deshlahra
- Trained
- Pattern cutting and tailoring
- Before this
- Six years in production for two Indian labels
- At JD’oro
- Buys the fabric, cuts the first sample, runs the workroom
- Based
- India
Photography · 4:5
Portrait: at the cutting table, mid-morning, a sleeve pattern weighted down in front of her.
In her own words
I spent six years in production before I made anything of my own, which is the least glamorous route into this industry and the most useful one. Production is where you find out what a garment costs — not what it is priced at, what it costs — and where you watch good design get compromised at nine in the evening because a delivery date will not move.
The thing I could not get past was the fabric. Every label I worked with had a shelf of it. Rolls ordered above the minimum, colours dropped after dyeing, whole collections cancelled after the cloth arrived. It sat there for years, and the longer it sat the less anybody wanted to think about it.
I started buying it. Not with a plan — I bought four part-rolls of wool suiting because I could not stand watching them go to a shredder, and then I had to work out what to do with them. That is genuinely how this began, and it is still how it works.
I do not design a garment and then find fabric for it. I buy fabric and then find out what it is for.
Why I still cut the first sample
Because a pattern is where a garment is decided. Everything after it is execution. If the armhole is wrong you can sew it beautifully and it will still pull when you raise your arm, and no amount of hand-finishing will rescue that.
It also keeps the collection honest. If I had to hand a design to someone else to cut, I would draw more of them. Cutting them myself means I only start something I believe is worth the fabric — and with surplus, the fabric is the thing you cannot get more of.
Straight questions
The ones she is asked most.
Is a made-to-order house scalable?
Not in the way investors mean, and I have stopped apologising for that.
The longer answer
Our production is capped by how much surplus fabric exists in the weights we can use. If we grew ten times, we would run out of material and start commissioning new cloth with a nicer story attached. I would rather run a workroom of six that is honest than a brand of sixty that is not.
What is the hardest part?
Telling someone a piece they love has retired, and meaning it.
The longer answer
It happens most weeks. The commercially sensible response is to remake it in something similar, and every time I decline I am turning down money. But a dress cut in a different silk is a different dress, and if I do that once I will do it every time.
Why not lean harder on sustainability in the marketing?
Because the word has been used up, and specifics survive scrutiny where adjectives do not.
The longer answer
Everyone claims it now, so the claim carries no information. I would rather tell you that side seams carry four centimetres of allowance and that a roll of forty metres makes eleven dresses. You can check both of those. You cannot check a feeling.
Who is this for?
People who intend to keep things. That is the only qualification.
The longer answer
Most of our customers are working women between their mid-twenties and mid-forties — architects, founders, doctors, people who need clothes that hold up to being worn constantly. But the deciding trait is not an age or an income. It is whether you buy expecting to still own it in five years.