“I saw that the yarn was very fine,” he says, and for the first time Shankar thought of using calotropis gigantea plants, so abundant in the area’s coastal villages, for fabric.
A natural fashion entrepreneur in southern India, Shankar saw a group of sunbirds near his window one day taking a fiber out of a wild shrub to keep their young ones warm. The sunbirds beat Gowri Shankar to the punch. With growing interest in Europe amid a sustainable fashion boom, Shankar’s Weganool looks like it has wide appeal.
Fashion entrepreneur Gowri Shankar is harnessing the calotropis gigantea shrub, common around his southern India home, to create vegan wool.
