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The Artist
Meet
Smilika
A textile and fashion designer whose practice is rooted in family, craft, and a lifelong sensitivity to materials.
A textile and fashion designer whose practice is rooted in family, craft, and a lifelong sensitivity to materials.
Smilika is a textile and fashion designer whose practice is rooted in family, craft, and a lifelong sensitivity to materials. Raised in a textile environment, she grew up surrounded by handloom weaving, fabric, and garment making, where making was not treated as a luxury but as part of everyday life.
That early exposure shaped her way of seeing the world: through texture, structure, care, and transformation.
She completed her B.Des in Fashion Design at FDDI, Hyderabad, India, where she built a strong foundation in silhouette, styling, garment construction, and surface development. She is now pursuing her MA in Textiles at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom, UK, where her practice has become more experimental and research-led.
Through this journey, she has moved from fashion design into a deeper exploration of materials, sustainability, and textile-led storytelling.
For Smilika, sustainability is not a recent idea — it has been part of how she has lived and learned from an early age. She was raised to use resources carefully and to value water, electricity, food, and fabric, understanding that nothing should be wasted.
Since childhood, she has worked with offcuts and discarded materials from her mother's studio, turning them into wearable forms. This gives her practice a personal honesty and a quiet continuity between life, memory, and making.
Smilika sees textiles as a space where tradition and innovation can meet. Her vision is to create work that is thoughtful, tactile, and meaningful, while continuing to explore reclaimed materials, craft techniques, and experimental making.
She is drawn to the idea that materials can carry stories and that waste can be reimagined as the beginning of something new.
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