Fashion designer Anuj Sharma (IND) works mainly in areas of craft development and sustainability. Sharma’s other areas include teaching fashion and understanding human behaviour with the help of fashion. He has previously shown collection in Japan, UK, Sweden, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. He was also a regular at Lakme fashion week in Mumbai.
Anuj Sharma entered into fashion with his debut collection called Sunday Market in 2007, after his post-graduation studies in Apparel Design at the renowned design school, National Institute of Design (NID), India and a Masters in High-performance Sportswear Design at the University of Derby, UK, for which he was awarded the Charles Wallice India trust scholarship in 2002.
Anuj Sharma has come up with a unique method to construct clothes without any machine, tools or stitches technique. It is titled Button Masala. The method has led to the Button Masala collection, which has been shown internationally for e.g. as part of the travelling exhibition Connecting Concepts by Dutch design DFA, and part of the exhibition Bliss at the Taiwan design expo 2011. He has taught the technique of Button Masala to over 20000 people across the world.
He was invited to give a TED talk on the method of his button masala collection in TED x Delhi and he was awarded the Most Innovative Collection of the Year Award 2009 for his collection Button Masala at Marie Claire Made in India Fashion Awards.
Button Masala was recently selected as one of the 10 most sustainable projects in the open category by State of Fashion Holland and the work was exhibited in Arnhem, Holland
Levis India collaborated with Button masala to come out with a signature piece using the technique.
He was also artist in residence at Iaspis, Stockholm and was a recipient of Studio Grant Residency Programme in 2015. He also held about 30 workshops of button masala in Sweden, South Africa, Germany, Denmark, Sri Lanka and Holland.Sharma has also worked on design of Indian police uniform for BPR&D.
He is frequently invited as workshop leader and lecturer to talk about his innovative design and method development, for e.g. in South Africa as a part of India Africa programme, and the India Design Forum which was held at NCPA, Mumbai, 2013. In 2011 Sharma was invited by HCL to give a talk on unconventional management during World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. He was invited by Adidas to its design headquarters in Germany to teach Button masala to their design team in the year 2017.
Sharma has also attended Fashion Coterie in New York, participated with a show at Alchemy festival in London and was selected amongst four finalists for International Young Fashion Entrepreneur of the Year award (IFFEY) by British Council, India
About Button Masala
It is a simple joinery system, which replaces sewing from the clothing or home furnishing. The technique involves only buttons and rubber bands. It is pretty much like tie and dye technique but done with rubber bands. Button masala is a very quick construction method, possibly the cheapest in the world and the greenest for the environment. Each product can be recycled and restructured by simply removing the buttons and putting them in another place. The technique is also used to make carpets, bags, jewelry, shoes and many other useful products. What is nice is that that everyone can use the technique. The technique is easy to be taught and is an open source. It’s already been taught to almost 40000 people across countries like Holland, Sweden, Spain, Austria,, Switzerland, Germany, Srilanka, South Africa, Uganda, Denmark, Bangladesh, France and India.
Please have a look at TED X video of Button Masala to understand it better.