On the top of the pandemic final March, Sheena Sood did not be a part of the flocks of these New York Metropolis residents fleeing the 5 boroughs. The founder and designer of trend label Abacaxi stayed put in her Brooklyn condominium and made masks — 1000’s of them. Some had been beaded, others tie-dyed, all hand-worked, escapist and naturally, evocative of far much less dystopian time.
“I used to be making an attempt to consider what I might contribute, and for me, masks had been one factor I might do,” she remembers. “There wasn’t a lot else you would concentrate on, so I simply began making them and after I put them on my Instagram Tales, everyone wanted them.”
The masks did not simply give her a function throughout a terrifying, dizzying time. Additionally they introduced her textile-forward sustainable model — which, at that time, had been in operation for greater than seven years — to a completely new client base when most enterprise was sputtering to a halt.
This March, Sood had different plans. As the primary twinges of pre-crisis normalcy started sweeping into Brooklyn, Sood boarded a flight to the Mexican coastal state of Oaxaca to start an artists’ residency. For almost 5 weeks, she studied the artwork and observe of conventional plant dying, all underneath the tutelage of a grasp dyer.
As a richly biodiverse area, Oaxaca has lengthy been one in every of Mexico’s main producers of handcrafts, the processes for which the area’s Indigenous teams have perfected over 1000’s of years. Sood arrived hoping to study extra about a type of processes, particularly: cochineal dyeing, derived from parasitic bugs discovered on the pads of prickly pear cacti. The small, beetle-like bugs produce carminic acid, which, when extracted, yield a vibrant pink ink.
Sood put her new experience to work instantly when she returned to Brooklyn and, not three months after her residency got here to an finish, cochineal-dyed items — together with one notably slinky, two-tone lavender slip gown — turned obtainable to buy on Abacaxi’s web site. Such is the Abacaxi approach.
“Each designer has their very own specialty, and material design is mine,” says Sood. “I do know that a variety of bigger designers purchase the unique paintings from an artist or from a textile designer. The benefit for me is that, properly, not solely do I not have to try this, however creating these customized materials and prints is simply a part of my course of.”
Sood’s trend prowess kicked in early, and like many millennials, got here closely impressed by the Delia’s catalogs that may arrive in her mailbox every month. However on reflection, she recollects drawing extra affect from her household’s visits to India, throughout which she usually discovered herself at native markets along with her mother and aunt, surrounded by a kaleidoscope of cloth and colour.
“I used to be fascinated by the truth that you would simply get your material, take it to the embroiderer, take it to the beading man, take it to the tailor and actually design your personal garments,” she says. “That, clearly, was an enormous a part of why I later turned a designer.”
By the point Sood headed to school, textile design had crossed over from a private, familial curiosity to knowledgeable one. Sood studied visible arts at each Brown College and Central Saint Martins, the place she integrated textile methods like tie-dyeing, beading and embroidery into her portray and images. Upon commencement, she minimize her enamel as an assistant designer at Tracy Reese, creating paintings and designs for brand new prints and gildings. In 2012, she left her position and headed to India, the place her mother and father had been dwelling, to take a while off.
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“Once I got here again, I used to be in search of one other job, however I additionally needed to do one thing with textiles I had collected and began interested by what I needed to make with them,” says Sood. “On the identical time, I met somebody who had a boutique in Park Slope, and he or she was carrying different ethically- or locally-made items. She inspired me to make some items for her retailer.”
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In 2013, the very first Abacaxi capsule was born — although actually, it wasn’t official till Sood was in a position to assign it the right identify. Enter abacaxi, a big, candy pineapple grown largely in Brazil.
“I used to be interested by my travels in Brazil that occurred years earlier than, and I knew that I needed the model to be very tropical-inspired and joyous and completely happy,” she explains. “Pineapples are symbols of happiness and good luck, so the phrase ‘abacaxi’ got here to me. The model began constructing from there.”
For almost 5 years, Sood labored on Abacaxi as a facet undertaking whereas freelancing in textile design for manufacturers like Cole Haan, Rachel Roy and Anthropologie. By 2018, Sood had accrued sufficient financial savings to run with Abacaxi full-time, and he or she relaunched it into what it’s right now: a celebration of conventional textiles created in small batches and in collaboration with artisans and weavers all through India and Peru.
A glance from Abacaxi’s Spring 2021 assortment.
Picture: Courtesy of Abacaxi
Come February of 2020, Abacaxi was driving excessive, exhibiting at Paris Vogue Week. However with COVID-19 taking maintain, Sood hightailed it again to Brooklyn, the place she turned to mask-making.
“It began with me making and promoting them myself, however I had to determine in a short time, inside a few weeks, how I might scale up,” she says. “It isn’t like I had a complete setup right here, as a extremely small model. All the pieces was fully shut down, however all of the sewers I’ve labored with, a lot of whom had been in Brooklyn, had been additionally in search of work. I had 4 or 5 sewers making masks from their properties for a number of months.”
Abacaxi’s masks took off early, incomes the model a flutter of {industry} consideration from publications like InStyle, New York and Essence. In September, Teen Vogue named Sood to its 2020 Era Subsequent class, a aggressive mentorship program for rising designers.
“The masks buyer is a a lot wider buyer than the clothes buyer, so it led to a lot extra site visitors and on-line gross sales,” she says. “You by no means know what the universe has in retailer for you, and it gave me some perception that that is what I am speculated to do.”
However do not go about calling Abacaxi an in a single day success. Sood has been constructing the model since 2013, in any case, and it is taken simply as lengthy to forge a provide chain with which she’s snug serving because the spine of her model. At the moment, Abacaxi’s companions embrace a manufacturing workshop in New Delhi and weavers in Peru. Plus, she makes use of principally pure (and even upcycled) fibers like cotton khaki, linen, silk and alpaca. Talking of cotton: Sood lately inked a partnership with Oshadi Collective, an industry-beloved regenerative agricultural group that restores broken cotton farms in South India.
“We name it regenerative farming, however it’s actually historic Indian farming,” says Sood. “It is a return to the way in which that cotton was grown when it was nonetheless sustainable, earlier than agriculture turned colonized by strategies of huge rising. The plant provides you extra whenever you let it do its personal factor.”
The regeneration that Oshadi Collective is selling is, in a approach, an extra extension of her identification as a South Asian-American lady, which stays on the coronary heart of every part Sood does along with her label.
“My entire aim, and what drove me to wish to begin Abacaxi, was to convey these beautiful and typically uncommon textile methods again into the on a regular basis,” she says. “I am very a lot impressed by my heritage, each the richness of the textiles, but additionally the historical past behind all of them. I could not assist however be vocal about it as a result of I believe the work itself is extra vocal than I’m.”
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