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Acid Moons’ new womenswear collection, made in collaboration with a Phulia weaving cooperative, transforms Bengal’s historic handloom tradition into contemporary linen silhouettes while supporting one of India’s last surviving Tangail weaving communities.
In Phulia, a mofussil town in West Bengal’s Nadia district, history is woven into the handloom. The fabric woven here today is a remnant of a textile so fine, it was known as ‘baft hawa’ or ‘woven air’. The Phulia weaving cluster is among the last remaining centres of Bengal’s legendary muslin industry — systematically dismantled by the British during the colonial era and forever altered by Partition and migration in 1947, during India’s struggle for independence, and again in 1971, during the birth of Bangladesh.
“The Phulia cooperative is the exact community of weavers whose families crossed from Tangail into West Bengal,” says Kareena Oberoi, founder of the Delhi-based clothing label Acid Moons.
“My family was displaced from Lahore during Partition, one of the millions for whom 1947 was a rupture that changed everything,” Kareena says. “That history is in my body in ways I am still trying to understand. One of my grandfathers was a zamindar in Lahore, and the other was a wholesaler who imported dried fruits from Afghanistan; my grandparents deserted their homes overnight and started afresh. So naturally, when I found myself working with weavers whose families crossed a different border at a different moment of the same wound, something clicked into place that I cannot fully articulate but cannot ignore either.”
In 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, the Hindu Basak weavers’ community from Tangail in erstwhile East Pakistan crossed into India carrying only the inherited knowledge of weaving the Tangail saree — one of the subcontinent’s finest handloom traditions. Many settled in Phulia, where earlier migrants from the 1947 Partition had already begun rebuilding their lives alongside the historic weaving town of Shantipur.
In Phulia, the Tangail tradition encountered the centuries-old Shantipur lineage, producing the distinct Phulia Tangail style — marked by restrained ornamentation and extraordinary attention to detail. To protect artisans from exploitative middlemen and the growing threat of cheap powerloom imitations, weaving cooperatives emerged in the 1970s.
Today, Phulia remains India’s only centre for traditional Tangail weaving. But the number of handlooms has sharply declined — from nearly 75,000 to fewer than 20,000 in just two decades — and younger generations are leaving the craft behind, threatening its survival.
That is where Acid Moons has come in. “‘Prelude’, our first womenswear collection of six pieces in handloom linen is made with the Phulia cooperative,” Kareena says. Working closely with the artisans of the Nutan Fulia Tantubay Samabay Samity, the label is helping the cooperative to sustain and expand the craft.
Acid Moons’ collaboration with the cooperative centres on handloom linen. The process begins even before weaving starts. The linen yarn travels from another village several hours away before reaching Phulia’s looms, where a single artisan spends nearly an entire day weaving around four metres of fabric — enough for roughly one and a half shirts. These details, Kareena says, reveal the true human labour in handloom production.
Working with linen also presents technical challenges distinct from cotton, the fibre more commonly associated with Bengal’s weaving traditions. Linen yarn carries natural slubs and irregularities that become difficult to manage once the fabric is cut into structured garments. According to Kareena, every seam, panel placement, and finishing technique must account for how the cloth behaves under tension while still preserving its natural drape. Linen also places greater strain on the loom itself, requiring tighter warp control and carrying a higher risk of thread breakage.
Only a small number of weavers currently possess the specialised knowledge required to weave linen at a commercially viable scale. Instead of treating this limitation as an obstacle, Kareena sees it as central to the value of the work. By adapting handloom linen for contemporary silhouettes and tailoring techniques, Acid Moons’ collaboration with the cooperative is, at once, generating new forms for an old textile tradition and also expanding the technical knowhow of the artisans themselves.
“Womenswear in India has a complex relationship with craft, most visibly appearing in the saree, the salwar, the lehenga — forms that contain traditional cloth,” Kareena says. “The moment you take handloom linen from a Tangail cooperative and cut it into a trouser or a blouse, you are doing something that has almost no precedent in contemporary Indian design. You are asking a cloth that has always been worn draped to be worn structured.”
The result is a collection crafted in direct conversation with the behaviour of the textile itself. The Shaman Pants use a specific thread count that allows the linen to hold a wide-leg silhouette without added structure, while the Fortune Dress lets the material’s texture and drape take centre stage. The Cirque Blouse references the saree through a dupatta-like scarf detail designed to shift shape with the wearer, and the more structured Cigar Blouse keeps ornamentation minimal so the linen remains the dominant visual element. The collection’s two skirts carry its most layered conceptual gesture, drawing from European techniques of fabric manipulation such as ruffles, gathers, and spiral cuts. By applying that aesthetic vocabulary — historically tied to colonial fashion histories — to handloom linen woven within the Tangail tradition, the collection reframes and reclaims a textile history once threatened by the very forces that shaped global fashion itself.
The story of Phulia is also the story of the subcontinent itself: of arbitrary borders drawn through living cultures, of communities uprooted, displaced, and remade a shadow of their former selves, and of knowledge surviving in the hands of artisans. The Tangail weave endured because generations of weavers carried it across historical ruptures that erased homes, livelihoods, and geographies, preserving an entire textile tradition through memory, labour, and migration. Acid Moons’ collaboration with the Phulia cooperative enters this history as an argument for continuity through change. By adapting handloom linen from the Tangail weavers into structured womenswear, the collaboration asks what it means for craft not only to survive, but to remain alive in the present.
As Kareena puts it, “You do not preserve it (the craft) by protecting it. You preserve it by demanding something new from it. Every time we ask the cooperative to work linen for a contemporary silhouette, we are extending the knowledge base of a tradition that crossed two borders to survive. That is what keeps craft alive — not museums, not heritage tags, but the ongoing negotiation between the tradition and the present moment.”
Follow @acidmoonsstudio on Instagram. Explore the collection here.
