Journey of Eight Thousand Miles continues
The young, dynamic lifestyle brand, Eight Thousand Miles gives its audience a bohemian-chic design aesthetic.
Eight Thousand Miles is a sustainable, ethical handcrafted lifestyle label for children (newborn to 12 years) and adults. Their prints and patterns are sketched in New York, hand-block printed by heritage textile-printing communities and sewn into apparel by a small fair-trade, artisan-empowered non-profit organisation in India.
The brand reflects a play of a diverse, eclectic palette of prints, with an emphasis on gender-neutral styles, reversible patterns combining them with vibrant colors and many textures.
Their main goal is to make the little ones comfortable; their characteristics such as simple cuts and silhouettes merged with playful styles ensure that the fabric is the key focus and comfort is the top priority.
Their handmade collections feature artisan made textiles in collaboration with traditional textile printers in India, thereby helping sustain heritage craft and providing ethical employment to them and their families. Their block printing workshop is in Bagru, India owned and operated by a fourth-generation printer.
Each part of the printing process is done by hand by a member of the community, from hand carving the designs onto wooden blocks to mixing natural dyes and drying fabrics in the fields. By approaching design with a socially conscious spirit, the brand aims to provide work to artisans and help keep the art of handmade textiles for many years to come!
By working closely with craftsmen to learn and experiment, the brand infuses ancient craft techniques with their own contemporary bohemian-chic design aesthetic. Their clothing is all-natural; made of the highest quality cotton, designed for all the play of free spirited wanderers worldwide!
This year, their new collection includes a mix of their timeless, classic signature prints and new fascinating prints for Spring-Summer 2019. The collection's prints are quite dynamic and versatile; you might think their earth print is brussel sprouts or their mango print is lemon, carrots, peaches even. Thereby they lend a sense of relatability to their public at different levels, while encouraging the free expression.
With this new collection, Eight Thousand Miles emboldens kids to go wander and you as parents to let them be!
Founded in 2014, by Shweyta Mudgal, an architect who lives between her two antipodal homes of Mumbai and New York, Eight Thousand Miles' name originates from the cultural and cartographical distance between those two cities, which the brand itself became the bridge on this aspiring journey between these two cities celebrating the idea that home is a place without borders.
The idea of Eight Thousand Miles was born somewhere while traversing along the 8000 odd mile distance that separates my two chosen homes, Mumbai and New York. Ironically enough, 8000 miles also happens to be the diameter of the earth metaphorically symbolizing the antipodal locations of these two cities.
Founder of Eight Thousand Miles, Shwyeta Mudgal
Shweyta has an intriguing story, given that she started her career designing airports and now runs an apparel design company.
All Eight Thousand Miles' collections are designed to be global in appeal. The styles are simple silhouettes, the prints on their natural cotton fabric are playful and relatable. The prints are hand-drawn and gender-neutral, translated from Shweyta's sketches onto wooden blocks and printed on organic cotton fabric with natural organic, azo-free dyes, in vibrant colors.
Shweyta Mudgal, Founder of Eight Thousand Miles
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