Bond built from junk

Two friends celebrate their drive for sustainability with a design studio that gets to the crux of recycling in the city

We’ve all had a friend we’ve shared a common interest with—to the point where we’ve daydreamed about starting a business together because of it. Most of these never see the light of day, but for Prakruthi Rao and Akshara Mehta, it led them to create their upcycling textile label Juhu Beach Studio. As batchmates at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, the duo discovered their joy for collecting waste and fashioning something stylish with it. “Both our rooms used to be packed with scraps and odds and ends,” recalls Mehta, explaining, “It wasn’t limited to fabric and threads. Even a single key from a keyboard would be refashioned into an elegant piece of jewellery.”

After graduating in 2019 and interning at a few textile companies and labels across the country, they found themselves back in their home city, Mumbai. “We also love walking around the city aimlessly and exploring it. It’s part of our creative process—to notice and get inspired by the things around us. This helped us discover an entire industry here based on waste collection that’s operating on an extremely large scale,” describes Rao. She further elaborates how the idea of waste collection isn’t something new in the country that’s suddenly become fashionable, as we see in the West. “Every household across each demographic has always collected and given away its waste to the local scrap dealer or kabadiwala. What we don’t realise is that all this is segregated and further reused in multiple ways across several industries. The segregation is as minute as extracting a few grams of copper from kilos of scrap wire to be resold as raw material again.”

Rao and Mehta plan to expand their creations beyond fashion to home decor and even styling commercial spaces with sustainable and reused material

“Most of our days are spent searching for specific waste aggregators which can range from sacks of buttons to discarded bedding. Unlike other design labels, our biggest challenge is that we don’t have a fixed design, pattern or style we can follow. We ad lib along the way based on the material, colours and textures we’re able to find,” they lament. They also share how working with scrap fabric isn’t the same as cutting out patterns from spools of material. “For each piece we find, we have to sit with our tailors and point out exactly where they have to make cuts—sometimes it’s as challenging as working around a couple of centimetres of cloth!” they add.

Today, their studio sells its first collection of vibrant headwear in a range of eclectic prints and styles (R1,200 onwards). They also plan to expand their creations beyond fashion to home décor and even styling commercial spaces with sustainable and reused material. With most of the world working from home during the pandemic, the girls were inspired to employ women from areas such as Dharavi to take up a role in their production process (like sowing, stuffing, cutting and pattern-making) from their own homes. “Till now, waste has always been associated with being dirty, and products made from it aren’t thought of as chic or coveted. We want to break this myth with items that are well-designed and don’t look like they’ve been recycled” says Mehta.

Prakruthi Rao and Akshara Mehta

A guide to being fashionably sustainable

>> Find a style that works for you and doesn’t follow the latest trends. This will make you buy clothes that are timeless, and won’t be discarded every season.
>> Don’t be a minimalist just because it’s on-trend! This involves throwing away things, which can instead be gifted or donated to someone else who’ll appreciate them.
>> Older pieces have more sentimental value—and a beautiful story behind them. It’s more fashionable to own objects that can be handed down for generations than an impulse fast-fashion buy.

WHAT: Juhu Beach Studio
WHERE: https://www.juhubeachstudio.com/

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