25 years of weaving reslience: Vaishali Shadangule's global rise
Dressed in a red salwar-kurta, Vaishali Shadangule was just 17 when she left home at 3 am, boarding a train from Vidisha to Bhopal without a ticket. Perhaps she didn’t know then that the trip of 60-odd km would also be the start of her creative journey.
At home, Shadangule remembers, a horse cart would arrive every morning to take her brother to school, while she could study only till the eighth grade, as long as it cost nothing. As a teen, she pitched in with work—taking tuitions, selling paintings, designing mehndi—to earn and fund her education. But that night, she chose to break away.
Today, at 47, Shadangule stands among India’s most singular design voices—celebrating a quarter century of work rooted in Indian textiles, craft, and handloom, while supporting over 3,500 families of weavers across seven states. She is the first Indian woman designer to showcase on the official calendar of Paris Haute Couture Week, the first to open a flagship store on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, and to launch a Western bridal line in Barcelona (in 2025).
Yet, the 17 years she spent at home were far from wasted.
Finding Fashion
The values that define Shadangule’s design philosophy were quietly absorbed from her mother for whom sustainability was a way of life. She would repurpose old saris into frocks or curtains, vegetable peels were used as compost for plants. These lessons have formed the foundation of her brand. “These things stay with you,” she says. “They become instinct.”
When she started her brand in 2000, she followed these ideologies almost subconsciously. “I have always been conscious about not throwing away fabric, but finding ways to use every bit,” she says. “When you treat nature like a part of your body, you are careful about what you create, how you create it, and how you treat people.”
This philosophy underpins everything she does, including her atelier in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, which was built using repurposed doors and windows. “I arrived with a truck filled with broken windows. The security guard wouldn’t let me into the building. I begged him for some time and patience.” She also drapes fabric directly on the dummy, avoiding unnecessary cutting.
But the start wasn’t easy. When she left home, Shadangule was hard-pressed for money, and took up multiple jobs in Bhopal. At one of them, she discovered her intuitive flair for fashion—styling colleagues, suggesting how garments could be paired or worn differently. A colleague encouraged her to consider fashion design, a field she hadn’t even known existed.
She spent a few days at a local fashion institute, learnt what a croquis was (a dummy sketch of a human figure), and began drawing. She managed to get hold of the syllabus of Mumbai’s SNDT University and studied fashion design online, she says. She put together a portfolio and started applying for jobs across cities, moving to Vadodara, and later to Mumbai, where she landed a job at an export house in Bandra. “It was challenging,” she recalls. “I couldn’t speak English. I couldn’t express myself. All I could do was design.”
A severe accident almost broke her back, but seven months later, she was back on her feet, searching for work. To survive, she became a gym instructor. She carried her portfolio to the gym, showing it to clients between sessions. One such client—the wife of a bank manager—was impressed enough to request a loan of ₹50,000 for Shadangule to start her own boutique. “I couldn’t sleep that night,” she says.
In 2000, Shadangule opened a 100-square-foot shop in.....to read more check out the forbes page https://www.forbesindia.com/article/life/25-years-of-weaving-resilience-vaishali-shadangules-global-rise/2992087/1
