In Conversation With Paño: How The Homegrown Human Doll Embraces Her Truest Self

Gracing the pages of magazines and sitting in the front row at fashion shows, human-doll Paño has become a major player in Indian fashion. Her two-foot-tall head, complete with long locks of yarn hair and bulging painted eyes, makes her impossible to miss. As she wanders the streets, she is like a cartoon character coming to life, effectively bridging our reality with a fantastical other dimension. When Sanskriti Sharma, the artist and mastermind behind Paño, puts on her doll head, she stretches our imagination and shows us how creativity can thrive beyond just garments in the world of fashion. 

Sharma’s work, however, cannot be reduced to a costume, nor her doll head to a mere accessory. Paño is a vessel for Sharma’s storytelling and a tool for exploring the world through a refreshed perspective. Behind Paño’s whimsical look is a fully fleshed-out character. Born in Cudillero, Spain to an Indian father and a Spanish mother, Paño travelled to India once she came of age. This is where she found her love for Indian crafts and fashion, which we can see her explore through her Instagram, @lovefrompano. 

Her profile showcases her work as a model for an impressive array of designers, interspersing her philosophical inner musings between shots of her embedded in the real world. Sharma’s work is so compelling not just for its visual strikingness, but because her commitment to Paño as a person in her own right blurs the lines between fiction and reality to near-non-existence.

When asked about the inspiration behind her doll alter ego, Sharma cited “My childhood days.” She describes Paño as an imaginary friend brought to life, conceived at a time when she was “lost and finding the purpose of existence.” The opportunity to embody a new identity, particularly one that is so foreign to the normalcies of our day-to-day lives, affords Sharma a level of freedom from conformity that many of us yearn for. “We need an alien vision to find the newness in one’s life,” she said, and by taking a walk in Paño’s undoubtedly alien shoes, Sharma can ascend past the mundane and into a world of creativity and fun. 

It is through her character's non-conformity and otherness that Sharma can explore her own innermost self. She mused that transforming into Paño is like a form of therapy, posing the question “We meet different people, but how often do we meet ourselves?” Through Paño, Sharma feels “It is like visiting myself and finding out something new in every visit.” Interestingly enough, it is through a removal of the self from reality that she is able to better understand her truest self.

When we consider who we are, rarely are our real personalities reflected in reality. We each have some part of ourselves, the weird and the wonderful, that we suppress; we're too afraid of judgment to be ourselves. What’s Sharma’s way forward, from an artist’s perspective?

“Just start, shut the voices in your head and take that damn first step ahead.” We all may not be Paño, joyously embracing the world in a large doll head, but we can embody her ethos, leap into our imaginations, and accept our differences from the status quo as strengths rather than weaknesses.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

India's First Abstractionist: The Life & Legacy Of Bengali Artist Bimal Das Gupta

Rain Dogs: How Goa's Strays Helped A Photographer Weather The Desolation Of The Pandemic

A Multicultural 20th Century Tryst Underlines The Apathy Of The Colonial Gaze