Aditya Singhal: The Denim Dreamweaver

IML Jeans’ Founder Aditya Singhal speaks to LifeSpice about his brands that offer personalised jeans and even one-of-one jeans that are made as per your wish and command.

Recently, I was invited to a luxury bespoke jeans workshop by It’s My Life (IML) Jeans. The brand specialises in creating customised jeans. Their designer visits your home, discusses the design and decorations you wish and their ace tailors create your jeans using high quality materials. The workshop was meant to give people a chance to sample the range of personalisation options offered by IML Jeans. Embroidery, patch, embellishments, back pockets, ripping, tearing, sewing, thread work, monograms, grinding, destruction, junk jewellery, chain, metals, rivets, was all being done at the workshop.

As the IML Jeans’ craftsmen went to work on making my tom-boyish three-fourth denims more girlish, I got chatting with the Founder, Aditya Singhal, who told me that they were initially thinking of doing a crazier workshop. “Imagine we hang your denims on the wall and give you all sorts of tools to destroy them…. Including swords and guns! But legally that becomes a challenge so we figured let’s keep it down a bit!” shared Aditya.

“We use the best threads in the world, from a company called Gütermann. They don’t break unless someone cuts them. Everything that goes in our jeans is of that standard, we use high quality pure metal buttons. When designing our jeans, we take into account the weather, the Indian woman’s physique and her preferences. Then we consider latest trends from Europe and blend them in. So, the final product is contemporary in design yet it’s meant for us,” said Aditya.

Briefing me about his company, Aditya explained, “We have three brands under our roof. One is IML Jeans, which is bespoke and all about preferences and personalisation. The second brand which we will be launching soon is Indie, a complete ready-to-wear line with the differentiation being that we will use only handloom fabric on denim. The idea is fast fashions, so every month we will change the designs. We’ve already tied-up with 9-10 online retailers. The last one is 1 Oak, which is a luxury label, where every piece would be made just once. Pricing for 1 Oak starts at INR 25,000 and it could even cross a lakh. Each piece takes about a month to make. Like IML Jeans, 1 Oak is direct-to-home, so a stylist and our designer will go to the customer’s house. 1 Oak it is about creativity and creating style statements, while IML Jeans is more about personalisation. Right now the service is only available in Delhi. We start with Mumbai next month. By next year we hope IML Jeans will at least be in the top 8 cities of India and 1 Oak in about 3-4 cities.”

Aditya’s team has got some really out-of-the-box personalisation requests from people in the last few years. “One customer wanted bullet holes in his denims. So, we actually got someone with a gun license to shoot through our fabrics,” shared Aditya. “Once a customer got pearls (artificial) embroidered all over her denim. We’ve had customers who’ve asked for real gold on the main jeans button. Another wanted an emerald on it. Then there was one customer who wanted cashmere denim.”

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“All the artisans you see here are not regular tailors,” said Aditya. “They have been hand-picked, trained personally by me and some other people for at least a month to meet our standards. For example when it comes to destruction, we give them dozens of jeans and tell them to destroy them in front of us, so we can critique and correct them.”

My jeans were ripped and stylised with a pretty flower-pattern added to the hem and to the top-edge of my back pockets. All in about an hour’s time. I think it’s a bit more girlish now. What do you think?