MQ Fashion Night: Studio Medium

Fashion Show STUDIO MEDIUM together with PITOUR: from 21h
Venue: Fashion Tent at MQ forecourt

Studio Medium is an apparel and textile design practice based in New Delhi. Their work and multidisciplinary approach reside on the crossroads of art, design, and fine craftsmanship. The spirit of experimentation and a sense of playfulness is what defines the studio’s DNA. Studio Medium work with traditional Indian craft techniques to create contemporary textiles and garments in natural dyes and azo free dyes. Along with that they work with various Japanese hand dyeing techniques like Arashi Shibori & Nui Shibori to make textiles & artworks.
The studio was set up in 2016 by textile artist and apparel designer Riddhi Jain, an alumna of the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Her works have been showcased nationally and internationally, the most recent one being at the World Shibori Symposium in Arimatsu, Japan.
At the Vienna Fashion Week this year, they propose to showcase a very important collection that concerns the times we live in. The collections Re and Borrow are a part of the sustainability initiative of the studio.

About the collection

Their collections ; Re and ‘bor(r)o(w) preserves and repurposes the by-products of our textile processes to relook at what is considered as ‘waste’ and to create intriguing textile art and garments. It is a collection that has been explored through necessity. The idea of extending the life of an object transcends cultures – patching, quilting, piecing and bringing together borrowed bits may have different names (Kantha in South Asia, Sashiko in Northern Japan) but the intent to preserve beauty remains timeless.
From dresses to outerwear, every garment has been crafted with borrowed stories that map the memory of unused fabric and discarded threads passed down from previous collections. This memory, so unique to each piece, would otherwise go undocumented. Just as minds choose to remember narratives and recreate the boundaries of reality, every garment borrows from earlier pieces and collections but now has its own imprints and a special tale to tell.

Riddhi Jain is Q21 Artist-in-Residence at MuseumsQuartier Wien in September 2022.

© Dhruv Satija