An INDOI Community Portrait - Barcelona

Six Women, One Thread: Inheritance, Belonging and the Making of Home

INDOI has always been about celebrating a legacy of the women who came before us. When Paroma (my friend and  photographer of this shoot) and I we began imagining this shoot, it felt only right that our story would find its thread in inheritance. Not only the kind carried in cloth, but the kind carried in memory, in migration, and in the quiet negotiations of belonging.

Why this story, and why now?

Inheritance is rarely one tidy thing. Its complex. It's a recipe half-remembered, a song sung in a language you now dream in only sometimes, a way of folding a sari or tying a dupatta that your body knows before your mind does. For those of us who live between cultures, it's also a deep question we keep asking: what do I keep, what do I translate, and what do I pass on?

That question sits at the heart of INDOI. Our pieces are inspired in a mix heritage, rooted in South Asian craft, made by hands that have held techniques for generations, yet they are shaped by a life lived here in Europe. They belong to two worlds at once, with neither diluting the other. We wanted to find the people who live that truth every day.

Why six South Asian women, and why Barcelona?

We chose to bring together six women from the South Asian diaspora living in Barcelona. Barcelona is a city of layers, and it is where INDOI has put down roots, in the streets of Poblenou. It is a place where many people are building lives far from where they began, and where belonging is something you make rather than something you're handed.

Each of the six women carries her own map: lands travelled, languages folded into one another, heritage worn differently depending on the room she's standing in. One may speak softly in her mother tongue at home, switch to Catalan at the school gates and Spanish at the fish market, and reach for English when the words need to be quick. Another may wear her heritage boldly in some spaces and quietly in others, and both are equally true.

That's the experience we wanted to explore. Belonging is not a single address. It's a practice, and sometimes a negotiation. It can be joyful, tender, complicated, or all three on the same afternoon. By placing these women at the centre of the story, in a city that is home to them, we wanted to ask what it looks like to belong in more than one place at once, and to show that the answer is as varied as the women themselves.

The women, and the pieces

In INDOI pieces made of handloom weaves, plant dyes and  with hand stitched detailes, these six women- Roshni, Anuja, Sejal, Raveena, Priya and Davina- became a mirror of the brand itself. The clothes weren't styled to disguise or to perform. They were worn the way heritage is worn in real life: personally, differently on each woman, and with ease.

The power of community

Behind every thread there is a hand, and behind every hand there is a community. This shoot reminded us that belonging is rarely found alone. It's found in the friend who tells you where to buy the right spices, recommend the right doctor and bring you home cooked food when you are under the weather,  the neighbour who understands why a certain local festival matters, and the other woman in the room who just gets it without being told.

Many of us today build chosen family far from our families of origin. We gather around tables, in kitchens, in shared silences that need no translation. This shoot was a version of that table. For a day, six women who carry similar questions in different ways were in the same room, laughing, comparing stories, adjusting each other's drapes and dupattas, and recognising themselves in one another.

That's what we hope you'll feel in the images: not six individual portraits, but a conversation. A community that exists because women choose to show up for one another.

More than a campaign

This is not a campaign about clothes. It's about what it means to carry your grandmother's hands in your own, to call more than one place home, and to decide, piece by piece and generation by generation, what you keep, what you translate, and what you pass on.

It's about the daughters who will inherit not just our textiles but our stories, and who will one day make their own choices about what to carry forward. It's about honouring the women who came before us by living fully and unapologetically in the in-between.

Six women. Six journeys. One thread.

Thank you to Roshni, Anuja, Sejal, Raveena, Priya and Davina for this beautiful portrait and to the amazing Paroma for shooting this for us. 

You can shop our the pieces worn in this shoot here in our Roots collection.