An aspiring Sri Lankan fashion designer has given the iconic American fashion wear a typically Asian look with her innovative creation that she has labelled as ‘batik denim.’
Kanchana Fernando’s patience and persistent attempts to succeed in a field close to her heart has won rich dividends by being nominated as the winner of the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week under the Sustainable Category which pays special emphasis on using recycled items. Her main raw material is discarded denims.
Talking to Sarasi Nethmini of Ada Derana Sinhala web site, Kanchana who studied IT at J’pura university in Sri Lanka says designing batik saris has been her family business for over 30 years where she experimented with her skills.
“The business was flourishing but unfortunately as tourism took a hit after the tsunami our business was badly affected. Most of our saris were sold in tourist shops. Things began to improve after my mother bargained for an order of 400 batik blouses for Odel, a premier fashion house in Sri Lanka. This company is obsessed with strict quality control and even if there is a problem with a thread they used to reject the whole stock. That way I learnt to be perfect.”
Then the family business encountered marketing problems of their rejuvenated product line as there was a large number of batik sari manufacturers and exporters. “I was working in an IT company in Colombo and started wearing saris designed by us. I wore a new sari everyday and people admired what they saw and there were inquiries on the street, in the office and in the bus. 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. Kanchana started her own Face Book page called Sanathana Fashions which also contributed to the rising demand of her saris.
Fashion has been her dream career but in a country where someone has to choose an education which promises a money-making future her passion took a backseat.
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 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.
“For a long time I had been waiting for an opportunity to work in MAS and I was ecstatic when they hired me. My experience in Pakistan was the main reason for their decision.” MAS, incidentally, is a major producer and exporter of Victoria’s Secret intimate wear based in Sri Lanka.
Kanchana says she was experimenting with designing something unique for the Mercedes Benz Fashion Show last year 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 a 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.”
“At that time I was working for MAS which had launched programme to help women discover their skills with the promise of financial help to start their ventures. I won the first place in 2017 and also grabbed a national award as the Best Entrepreneur of the Year.”
Kanchana is now popularizing her products internationally and the response has been amazing. She is exporting batik denims to Australia and China to be sold in pop-up boutiques.
The woman who has achieved success through sheer hard work and gifted talent has one more dream to achieve. That is to showcase her batik denim line at the New York Fashion Week. We are not sure how the Americans will be convinced of her products. Denim, as we all know, started as work clothes for the roughnecks and then turned into a fashion statement a generation later. Winning the hearts of the New Yorkers won’t be a tough task for Kanchana who also has a rare knack of realizing her dreams with sheer willpower to survive against heavy odds! newstrails.com (Pictures courtesy Ada Derana)
