Neharika Palivela

Excerpts from an Interview with the Designer

Recorded on: Feb 20 2023

Tell me about your collection!

My collection is inspired by the book, the Secret Garden, which is about a little girl who goes through a loss in her life, and then she moves and discovers this hidden garden. She starts pouring her love and her life into the garden and it starts to bloom into this magical thing. My collection explores the idea of grief, especially from a child’s perspective. It's a lot of 90s and y2k sleepwear inspired outfits, and there's also crochet and floral/butterfly accents to tie in the garden element. It's gonna be as close to 100% sustainable as possible.

I'm using all thrifted fabrics, and I'm trying to use as many thrifted notions and accents (buttons, zippers, lace) as possible. All of my yarn is thrifted as well. It's very hyper feminine and in general with my work, I like exploring the idea of femininity as a concept and not as a construct.

“Femininity as a concept and not a construct”: could you expand on that?

Throughout my life I have struggled with the idea of not being feminine enough. A lot of my work is just things that I find beautiful or pretty, or dainty. I like the concept of it [femininity] being unrelated to sexuality or gender, just being this beautiful, divine, powerful thing just on its own, comprised of things that I find pretty. So it's not locked into anything really. It's just what femininity is to me.

How did you get into crocheting/what made you decide to incorporate it in your collection?

It’s something that I picked up recently, like 2022-ish. It took me a while to learn. But eventually I picked it up and I feel like once I got the basics, everything else started to go really fast. I just really like it.

Would you consider it to be a challenge to use secondhand fabric?

Yes. It's a challenge because you have a certain idea in mind and you realize like, okay, I'm not gonna be able to make this work. I definitely for a minute was like maybe I should just buy fabric, like maybe I should just go to Joanne's. Thrifting fabric means you have to work with the fabric and whatever you find, but that's also the fun of it. It involves a unique kind of problem solving, but has always been worth it to me.

What does being creative mean for you in the context of designing and creating?

It all starts with an idea or an aesthetic, and it’s about building off of that. For this collection, the secret garden is a way to sum up the whole idea of it, but really it's inspired by my love for nature and pretty things. Sometimes I don’t even realize that I’m putting meaning, and a piece of myself into what I’m making until it’s already underway. Then I take a step back from the work and realize, oh, this is what I was trying to say.