Kanchana and sister Dilini. Three of Kanchana’s creations.
By Soma Munsinaghe
Sri Lankan designer Kanchana Niwanthi Fernando will showcase her creations at Hamilton Fashion Week this month beginning from February 18.
She will unveil four of her designs from her Upcycled Denim Collection. Her Facebook page says while vacationing in Canada last November she was walking in Hamilton Downtown in Ontario with a hand luggage full of her upcycled clothes.
“I went from shop to shop to show my stuff to see if they were interested. A friend suggested me a couple of designer wear boutiques and Ark Collective was one of them. The owner was incredible, and our ethos and vibes matched very well from the moment we had our first chat,” she said.
Her sister, Dilini Fernando, who lives in Hamilton, is coordinating the marketing of her brand in Canada.
The aspiring designer has given the iconic American fashion wear a typically Asian look with her innovative creation that she has labelled as ‘Batik Denim.’ Her main raw material is discarded denims. Her products came in for wide praise when she took part in Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in 2017 under the sustainable category, for paying special attention to using recycled items.
Kanchana was not a newcomer to the fashion industry. Her family owned a batik sari business for several decades. But the business slumped when tourism took a hit during the 2004 tsunami.
The family business encountered marketing problems, as there were many batik sari manufacturers and exporters.
“I work for MAS holdings for 10+ years now and I started wearing outfits designed by me. I wanted to wear a new outfit every day, which boosted my confidence and which helped me to gain traction among the rest of the colleagues as a unique designer,” Kachana told newstrails.com.
“That is a very strange ‘word of mouth’ advertising I resorted to popularise our family products,” she says talking about her struggling early days as a designer.
In 2009, she took part in a reality show conducted by Unilever where she had the opportunity to showcase saris designed by her and won the third place.
“The problem in my case, despite my talent, was I had no academic qualifications to back my designer claims. Usually, when you take part in a competition, the first thing they ask is ‘what kind of educational qualifications you have,” she says.
In 2013, she took part in a fashion show conducted by Academy of Design in Colombo, unveiling her products and she was selected for the first round.
Her biggest break came when an apparel company in Pakistan, which was looking for a fashion designer with IT background, hired her. A designer with that kind of educational background is a rarity in her field, she says. After working for one year in Pakistan, she returned to Sri Lanka armed with new skills.
Kanchana says she was experimenting with designing something unique for the Mercedes Benz Fashion Show and one day, when she was looking at her discarded denims, she saw one with a huge patch. That was the ‘Eureka moment’ for the budding designer and the rest is history.
The batik denim pioneered by her came first at the chic Mercedes Benz Fashion Week under the Sustainable Category in 2017. After that, she rented a stall in a popular flea market in Colombo. “In the early days, my products failed to catch on. Then I started the slogan ‘Give us an old denim and we will give you a new denim in a week’, and within months my products had a huge demand.”
Kanchana’s company Certitude by K is an ethical fashion brand which is focusing on social and environmental sustainability. She outlines the contribution of her upcycled clothes to the environment on her website.
“Do you know what goes in to your pair of jeans? 3625 liters of freshwater, 3 kg of toxic chemicals, 400MJ of energy, equivalent to keeping a light bulb on for 116 days, 13 sq meters of land to grow cotton, contaminated by pesticides and agrochemicals,” she says underlining her massive contribution to the society, presenting aesthetically pleasing and durable, cool line of denims. ©newstrails.com
