Designer Deepshikha Khanna builds her summer wardrobe around handwoven fabrics that honour India’s textile heritage while staying effortlessly wearable. From ethereal jamdani and sheer mull to textured khadi, characterful linen and luminous mulberry silk, she explains how each cloth is made, why its unique structure matters, and how these weaves shape her signature breezy, unstructured summer silhouettes.
Summer wardrobes are built from the ground up and, for designer Deepshikha Khanna, the foundation lies in choosing the right handwoven fabrics. Now the Creative Director of Kashmir Loom, Deepshikha has spent her career championing handloom textiles and keeping India's weaving traditions alive and wearable. Her approach is rooted in simplicity, heritage, and the belief that the finest fabrics need very little else. For our summer edit, she shares the handwoven textiles she reaches for every year, and why nothing else comes close.
Of all her summer fabrics, Khanna is most passionate about West Bengal's handwoven jamdani and once you understand how it is made, it is easy to see why. Unlike most woven textiles, the pattern is not printed or embroidered on afterwards. Instead, weavers build each motif directly on the loom, inserting tiny bamboo bobbins by hand, point by point, working the design into the very structure of the cloth as it is being woven. It is painstaking work therefore a single fine jamdani sari can take weeks to complete. What comes off the loom needs nothing more: the geometric motifs in soft pastels already sit within the weave itself, appearing to float on the surface. That same delicacy is what makes it such a natural summer fabric. "The fine weave and lightness are exactly why it suits flowy, unstructured summery silhouettes," she shares.
There was a time when only two weavers in all of India could hand-spin and weave a 500 thread count muslin thaan. That is the tradition Khanna is referring to when she talks about mul, a lineage so refined that Dhaka muslin was once famously described as woven air. The secret is not in any complicated weave structure but in the yarn itself, spun so fine that the resulting cloth is almost impossibly sheer. And that sheerness is precisely what makes mul such a versatile canvas. It takes chikankari embroidery beautifully where the translucent ground lets the shadow of each stitch show through from beneath, which is the entire point of shadow-work. It holds fine block print just as well as the dye seeps straight through the single layer of cloth so the same pattern appears, softly, on the reverse. That reverse impression, Khanna points out, is the clearest way to tell a true block print from a screen print.
Most people think of khadi as simply a hand-woven fabric, but Khanna is quick to point out that what truly defines it is what happens before the cloth is even on the loom. The yarn must be hand-spun on a charkha. That slow, deliberate process is what gives khadi its faint, irregular slub, the texture that no machine-spun yarn can replicate. It is also, incidentally, what gives it its certified trademark. Rooted in the weaving clusters of Ahmedabad, Rajkot, and Gondal in Gujarat, and in Ponduru in Andhra Pradesh, khadi has a versatility that belies its humble origins. It takes natural dyes, block and bagh print, and kantha stitch with equal ease, and blends readily with silk and wool as well. For Khanna, khadi saris are a summer non-negotiable. "Buying a sari also supports a weaver's full daily production of six yards — a good reason to wear more saris," she adds.
Khanna has a straightforward view on linen: stop fighting the crease. That characteristic rumple is not something that happens to the fabric, it is built into the flax fibre itself, a bast fibre with natural irregularities that show up in the yarn no matter how it is woven or finished. It is, she says, simply the texture of summer. Where she does have a strong opinion is on how linen should be styled. Since the fibre already brings so much character to the surface, she believes it reads best with a woven-in pattern like stripes, checks, or a simple dobby weave, rather than layering print or embroidery on top of a cloth that is already doing a great deal on its own. Linen's other great strength is how willingly it blends. It works with silk, cotton, and khadi and puts that fabric to practical use.
Not all silk is equal, and Khanna is particular about which kind she reaches for. What sets mulberry silk apart begins with the silkworm itself, domesticated, raised in carefully controlled conditions, and fed exclusively on mulberry leaves. That controlled upbringing produces a fibre of remarkable consistency, with a lustre and fluidity that wilder, less regulated silks simply cannot replicate. There is also something magical about the way it handles colour. The smooth fibre refracts light so that dyed shades look dense and luminous on the cloth, almost lit from within, rather than sitting flat on the surface. It is also, Khanna finds, an ideal base for craft, particularly resist-dye techniques like shibori and batik, where the silk's natural fluidity allows the dye to move and pool in ways that feel almost unpredictable. On the body, the effect is equally effortless. It is, she admits, the one fabric that reliably shifts her mood. "Every time I wear it, I am instantly in holiday mode," she says.