The fashion outsider making waves in Milan and New York

 When she had to design her new flagship store in Mumbai's Kala Ghoda, designer Vaishali Shadangule turned to the city's dumping yards for inspiration.

From Jogeshwari in the north to Chor Bazaar in the south, Shadangule scoured the city's antique vendors: not for full pieces of furniture like so many of us do to lend our homes and offices that antique-but-cool vibe but rather for discarded doors.

"Every door has a story, right?" Shadangule asks rhetorically,

"The grihapraveshs, the poojas, the weddings, the new births: The door is a silent witness to all of this and more. It's symbolic of new beginnings and I wanted to include that as part of my store's design narrative."

But this was just one of the reasons why Shadnagule went scouring through the junkyards in city's second-hand markets.Long before sustainability became a thing in the fashion industry, Shadnagule had been incorporating it in her design philosophy.

Shadangule who works under her eponymous label, Vaishali S, has been, for several years now, collaborating with local weavers around the country.

For her, being sustainable wasn't just a media release schtick but a serious attempt of going back to the roots.

Her most recent work with the weavers of a fabric called Khunn, native to the town of Guledgudda in Karnataka, has won her accolades in Milan and New York where she showed her khunn-inspired line at the fashion weeks.

It was her work with weavers of fabrics such as khunn and chanderi that made Shadangule sensitive to wastage in her business.

"I realised traditional Indian clothes and forms of weaving have a very small carbon footprint. They also have the least amount of wastage," she says.

It was this philosophy of minimal waste that has guided her design narrative for the store itself.

The main door, for instance, is made out of multiple old doors discarded by their original owners, presumably, for something modern.

Panels of the doors have been taken out and replaced with a small grille that lends it a retro rural look.