Some hand embroidery takes weeks per piece and fewer than 400 people still make it. Would you actually pay what "slow" really costs?

Been thinking about where hand-craft fits into sustainable fashion.

There's an embroidery from the Nilgiri Hills in South India: Toda embroidery, where a single shawl can take around three weeks, counted thread by thread entirely by hand. No machine, no printed pattern. Fewer than 400 women still practise it.

The craft only survives if the makers are paid for the time it actually takes. Underpay it and the next generation doesn't pick it up, it quietly disappears. Machine-made copies at a fraction of the price make that worse.

So I'm curious where people here actually land: would you pay more for something made this slowly and properly, or has fast fashion priced this kind of work out of most people's reach for good? Where's your honest line?

Submitted June 29, 2026 at 02:31AM by nilgiri_thread https://ift.tt/Ibyz2Wt