Brad Pitt’s seemingly simple indigo shirt in the F1 film hides a 700-year-old Indian craft: Tangaliya weaving from Surendranagar, Gujarat. Created by Dangasia artisans using handspun kala cotton and fermented indigo, the dotted pattern is built into the fabric, not printed. Once near extinction, this GI-tagged tradition now gains rare global visibility through a Hollywood costume choice.
Somewhere in the behind-the-scenes footage from F1, Brad Pitt is standing in an indigo shirt that took eight artisans and over nine hours to make. He plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up driver pulled back into the sport, and the costume department needed him to look like someone who had actually lived a life before the cameras started rolling. Costume designer Julian Day picked an indigo-dyed shirt from the Indian label 11.11/eleven eleven for exactly that reason—the colour and the texture did something a plain cotton shirt could not.
What most people watching did not register is that the shirt is woven, not printed. The dotted pattern running through the fabric is Tangaliya, a technique that comes out of Surendranagar district in Gujarat and has been practised for roughly 700 years by a single community—the Dangasias.
The origin story is part of why Tangaliya has survived this long. According to local accounts passed down through generations, a man from the Bharwad shepherd community and a woman from the Wankar weaver community married against both families' wishes sometime in the 14th century. They were cast out of their villages. The couple settled outside the boundaries and started weaving for a living, using wool supplied by the Bharwads. Their descendants became known as the Dangasias, derived from dang, meaning stick, and sia, meaning to go, and they remain the only community that practises this exact technique today.
The technique itself is what makes Tangaliya difficult to fake or mass-produce. Weavers twist an extra weft thread around several warp threads as they work, building up small raised dots, called dana, directly into the structure of the fabric rather than embroidering them on afterward. The dots appear identically on both sides of the cloth, which is the real technical signature: there is no telling which side is the front. Motifs were traditionally drawn from daily life—peacocks, trees, the nine-house grid pattern called naughara—and the weaving was done on pit looms, with weavers sitting below ground level to work them.
By the early 2000s, the craft was nearly gone. Fewer than ten families in Surendranagar were still weaving Tangaliya. NIFT Gandhinagar intervened in 2007, forming the Tangaliya Hastkala Association to help weavers move beyond wool into cotton and silk, and to introduce frame looms wide enough for new formats. Two years later, in 2009, Tangaliya received its GI tag, formally protecting it as a craft specific to Surendranagar. Today, more than 100 families across 26 villages keep it going.
The shirt Pitt wore was made under 11.11/eleven eleven, a label founded by Shani Himanshu and Mia Morikawa in 2009 under their parent company, CellDSGN. Himanshu has spent close to fifteen years working almost exclusively with indigo dyeing and handwoven textiles, largely outside the conventional fashion press cycle. The specific shirt was handspun kala cotton, naturally dyed using a fermented indigo process drawn from fructose, and credited to master weaver Baldevbhai Mohanbhai Rathore, a name that rarely makes it into the celebrity-style coverage built around the Pitt sighting.
For a craft that was down to single-digit practising families two decades ago, a single shirt on a Hollywood set has done more for visibility than most institutional efforts managed in years.