Woven by Ramu Nair · Kanchipuram
Kanjivaram Silk Saree, Deep Plum with Gold Border
Pure mulberry silk, 2800 gold zari pallu, contrast ivory blouse piece. Woven by master Ramu Nair over six weeks at his family loom in Kanchipuram.
Our Story
I grew up among the looms.
Then I went back to them.
My name is Revathi Gomathi. I was born in a weaving household in Kanchipuram — the kind of house where the shuttle's rhythm is the first thing you hear in the morning and the last thing you hear at night. My grandfather was a master Kanjivaram weaver; my mother dyed yarns in our back courtyard; three of my aunts ran a loom each on our street. I grew up with the smell of raw silk and the particular dust that hangs in the air of a weaver village in Tamil Nadu.
I left. Like many daughters of my generation, I went to Chennai to study, then to Bangalore for a corporate job in software, then to London for a Master's in Textile Design at Central Saint Martins. I stayed away for eleven years. I wore the Kanjivarams my mother posted me at weddings, and I understood — slowly, and then all at once — that the sarees hanging in my London wardrobe were more carefully made, more considered, more alive, than almost anything I was encountering in the designer boutiques around Bond Street.
I came home in 2019. The village had changed. Three of the eight looms on our street had closed. A national sari retailer had begun buying in bulk from Tamil Nadu weavers at rates so thin that the younger generation was leaving for the cities. My grandfather's loom was still running, but only just. I sat with him for a month and then decided what needed to be done.
The Gomathi is a direct-to-buyer label. We pay our weavers between 2.4× and 3× the standard buying rates. Every piece is signed on a linen label by the artisan who made it. We work with master weavers only — Ramu Nair in Kanchipuram, Lakshmi Iyer in Mysore, Murugan Pillai in Chinnalapatti, and Anjali Mahato, a tussar silk reeler and weaver in Jharkhand. There are no middle layers. When you buy a Gomathi saree, the name on the tag and the hands that made it are the same.
Our studio is on a lane in Kanchipuram that I walked as a child. We ship worldwide, wrapped in handmade cotton muslin, with a note about your weaver and an invitation to write back. Many of you do. Some of you have already bought your second and third pieces from us, and passed them on to your daughters. That is the old way — and it is the reason for all of this.
Revathi Gomathi
Founder, The Gomathi · Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu
