When Fashion Empowers And Heals

DENICA RIADINI-FLESCH, an economist-turned-entrepreneur and 2023 Rolex Awards Laureate, has built a social enterprise that empowers women while restoring the environment.

- CANDICE CHAN

While it may be fashionable to label a brand sustainable these days, Denica RiadiniFlesch-2023 Rolex Awards Laureate and founder of SukkhaCitta-prefers to use the term "regenerative". Her farm-tocloset business began in 2016 with a simple premise: fashion should benefit the people it relies on and the land it uses. In a time when words like "sustainable", "ethical", and "greenwashing" are often mentioned in the same breath, this distinction is important.

SukkhaCitta's claims are tangible: training that leads to fair wages, pricing that values time, support for smallholder farmers practising traditional, sustainable agriculture, and a short supply chain that keeps value close to its producers.

I travelled to Central Java to see how that promise holds true. In a classroom, my hand trembling, I traced hot wax over a cloth bearing pencil lines with a canting, a spouted tool for batik that resembles a pen. An ibu, which means "mother" in Bahasa Indonesia and is a respectful way to address the expert artisans, watched, nodded, and let me wrestle the line into place.

While the wax dried, I rode pillion across village roads to vegetation plots, where I waded the last metres on foot, past cotton shrubs in mixed rows and indigo plants growing under fruit trees. Back at the school, 1 dipped the same cloth into a basin of plant dye to watch the colour take. It was a demonstration swatch and definitely won't be worn, but the care and knowledge put into it were evident.

The brand's Rumah SukkhaCitta centresthree in Java, one in Bali, and another in Flores-serve as training hubs and pathways to paid work. As part of a curriculum that goes beyond technique and includes wagesetting and business literacy, young women apprentice with older artisans.

"We work primarily with mothers in their home villages," says Riadini-Flesch.