Gayatri Jolly’s love affair with fashion began at a young age. At 10, she would play dress-up with her dolls, carefully building garments with scraps of fabric and tape. Even as she got older, she’d spend hours drawing, sketching, and designing one garment after another, though none really hit the mark. After a failed attempt at designing her dress for university graduation, her mother led her down a different, more secure career path, advising her to stick to the family trade: business.
Heeding her mother’s advice, she left behind her sketches and makeshift outfits to study business at Babson College in Massachusetts. She still held on to her dream to run her own company inspired by her father, a businessman, and her mother, a social entrepreneur. However, when she returned home and began working for the family business, her career didn’t take the direction she thought it would. In India, where only 20% of leadership positions are held by women, Gayatri found herself in the same boat, questioning her future.
Determined to call the shots and build a career on her own terms, Gayatri took a leap of faith and returned to the U.S. This time, she would earn an associate degree in fashion design at New York’s Parsons School of Design — and turn her childhood passion into a sustainable business. Every sketch and every stitch gave Gayatri the courage and confidence she needed to push forward, challenge social and professional norms in India, and build a future with her at the helm.
“Design education helped me think differently and question all the values and conditioning that I held on to,” she said. “It helped me find confidence in myself. There were certain professors who really showed a lot of confidence in me, and that’s really meaningful because I think when authority figures show faith in you, you feel like your voice matters.”
Gayatri returned to India with a renewed sense of purpose. With her design knowledge and newfound confidence, she no longer felt restricted by her gender but empowered to challenge societal rules and build a fashion business of her own.
The process of setting up shop, however, came with an unexpected challenge. As Gayatri began to look for tailors to help her build out her own brand, she uncovered a history of inequity in India’s garment industry. The traditional tailor in India, known as masterji, was historically a male trained generation after generation. There was no training opportunity for women, let alone an entry-point. In traditional factories, women are only hired for end-stage tasks like sewing buttons to garments, despite being trained to do much more.
“When I moved back to India, I thought I’d start my own brand,” Gayatri said. “But when I was trying to do that, I realized that training centers are filled with women, but the industry is filled with men. Why the gap?”
India currently faces a huge shortage of skilled workers, with the need growing to 10 million by 2020. Yet no one is really looking at women to fill that void. Gayatri, who had volunteered at her mother’s nonprofit along with a number of others growing up, realized how developing a woman’s skills can change the course of her life. “The training infrastructure doesn’t exist here,” Gayatri said. “The men are trained through a very informal generational system, but the women are not being trained. And it’s not just skills they acquire, it’s also the ability to view themselves as authority figures, the ability to be financially independent.” Her training at Parsons helped her see the gap in India’s garment industry and start to explore possible solutions.
Taking what she had learned at Parsons, Gayatri began to build the framework for her own training program designed exclusively for women. She called it MasterG. Today, MasterG is India’s first and only all-female design, manufacturing, and fashion program that trains, hires and empowers low-income women — and one of the country’s only factories fully operated by women.
The intensive, year-long program is mostly taught by traditional masterjis who have earned their title over the years and were selected to share the trade with the women. The women pay a small enrollment fee and are taught everything from pattern-making and sewing to costing and business development. They are trained to a level where they can be hired in the fashion industry. Gayatri’s aim is to provide the women with all the skills they would need to set up their own tailoring business if they’re interested.
“We use design as a medium for the women to learn the art of questioning,” Gayatri said. “With pattern-making, there is a standard design women learn and then they create their own designs, which helps them become very comfortable questioning traditional patterns and silhouettes. By the end of the program, the students not only have skills they can earn with, but they also have the ability to navigate struggles in their personal lives.”
Since its inception in 2015, MasterG has trained more than 1,000 women through three training centers in Delhi and Haryana. MasterG graduates have gone on to set up shops in their communities, train other women at the MasterG studio or work on Gayatri’s personal line, Heimat, launched in 2018. Gayatri created the label in honor of the women. The name Heimat means homecoming and the patterns on the garments are designed to resemble the aerial view of the settlements Gayatri’s MasterGs come from.
The MasterG studio is tucked away in New Delhi’s Okhla area, which sits at the edge of the city’s center. It’s an unassuming industrial neighborhood, filled with factories where laborers work against the clock to meet supplier — and the city’s rapidly growing consumer — demand. What you wouldn’t expect to find in this bustling area is a peaceful, chic little fashion studio of young women, crafting vibrant, intricately detailed garments from scratch. On one end, you hear the whirr of sewing machines as young women whip up a new batch of garments and, on the other, you have women huddled over a multi-colored mountain of uncut fabrics, design books, and paper patterns as they plot out their next piece.
These talented ladies give Gayatri her motivation. While she knows there is more work to do, like growing the business model, she sees the impact in the women’s lives. “There were days at the beginning where I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing,” Gayatri admits. “But then I see where the women were and where they are now, and I know, if all else fails, this is what we’re working for. Even on the worst days when I feel like I’m completely burnt out, I see the power in the program and keep going. I can’t stop.”
With MasterG, Gayatri strives to break traditional gender norms and empower a new generation of women, working for themselves to build better lives. Her social enterprise is empowering young women to grow not just professionally, but also personally. The MasterGs have learned to speak up, express their opinions, and build a community amongst themselves.
“The studio gives us a chance to work as a family,” said Rajni, MasterG’s chief patternmaker. “We bond over the things that connect us and the problems we’ve tackled.”
Rajni along with her co-workers, Kahkeshan and Rijhwana, took the initiative and set up a group within MasterG to manage quality control across different training centers. Thee women visit the centers to make sure the foundation of the MasterG curriculum remains strong as more women sign up for the program. “They walked into my office one day and announced that they’re doing this,” Gayatri said, “They want to ensure future seamstresses are skilled to take on any challenge in the industry.”
While her coterie of MasterGs keep Gayatri on her toes, she has a few tricks up her sleeve as well. Most recently, she has teamed up with a software company to take the MasterG program online, so she can reach more women in cities and states across the country. Her goal: to reach one million women in the next five years.
Gayatri’s journey has helped shape the world she’s created for her MasterGs, but she shows no signs of stopping. There’s not a day that goes by when she’s not questioning positions of power or challenging gender norms in business to build a more just future for herself and the women she serves.
“I hope our women are able to articulate their dreams in the way they want without the noise around them,” she said. “I want them to get on a path using whatever MasterG gives them, whether it be pursuing their childhood dream of singing or being a fashion designer.” In a time when gender roles are in flux and voices of the marginalized are stifled, Gayatri is breaking the patterns of poverty one MasterG at a time.
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