About
Vardhini Pendharkar works across craft, culture, fashion and strategic communication.
Her practice is shaped by an interest in how cultural histories and traditional practices can be reimagined through brand systems, campaigns, films and visual storytelling. Working between research and creative strategy, she develops projects that use storytelling to position fashion as a space for memory, identity and cultural meaning.
She approaches communication as a way to build relevance, create visibility and bring cultural fashion narratives into contemporary formats.
NILASA: Indian indigo, reclaimed for the present.
A craft film documenting Indian indigo through process, material and hands. The film presents indigo as a living practice shaped by knowledge, labour and time.
Nilasa is a cultural platform dedicated to reclaiming and repositioning Indian indigo as a contemporary material practice within the global fashion landscape.
The project responds to the layered history of Indian indigo, a material once rooted in craft, land and knowledge, later transformed under colonial rule into a commodity tied to extraction, coercion and forgetting.
In response, Nilasa explores how Indian indigo can be made visible again through a multi-touchpoint brand system. At its core is knowledge exchange, developed through workshops, masterclasses and immersive formats that bring audiences closer to indigo as a living dye, process and cultural practice.
Blueprint, Nilasa’s hero garment, acts as a tangible entry point into this system. Dyed with natural Indian indigo in three shades, it translates the material into a wearable form designed to be lived with. Blue Hands extends this into cultural engagement, using the blue-stained hand as a symbol of stain, transfer and reclamation between makers and wearers. Together, Nilasa positions Indian indigo as something to learn, wear, participate in and value in the present.
Indian indigo, reclaimed in the present.
Creative direction: Vardhini Pendharkar
Photography: June
Cinematography: Sanved
Styling: Samartha
HMUA: Sukriti
Talents: Issheeta, Shibna & Vedant
Wang Yijia
Camylia Ahmad
Sadaf Khan
Diya Aratti
Sara Jain Ajay Kumar
Nadiah Norzain
