For most of my working life, I left the house in a saree.
Pleats checked at the door. Pallu pinned so it would hold through the commute, through the day, through whatever the day decided to be. I did that for years. I went to work, I came home, and I kept a household running in the hours that were left over.
I looked after my husband. I raised my son and my daughter. Everything I had went into making sure the people around me could stand on their own feet — and they do now, all of them. That was the work. I would not trade it.
But I want to say the quieter part too, because I think a lot of women will recognise it.
Somewhere in all of that, I got very good at taking up less room
I sat in rooms where I knew the answer and waited to be asked. I watched my sentences get finished by someone else. I watched other women — women I love, women far cleverer than the people interrupting them — get talked over so smoothly that no one in the room even noticed it happening. Least of all us. We had learned to carry on as though nothing had.
Nobody was cruel about it. That is what makes it hard to explain. It was simply the shape of things, and you adjust to a shape you live inside for long enough.
I was never a defeated person. I have been stubborn and hopeful my whole life, through thick and through thin, and I stayed that way. But being strong and being heard are not the same thing, and I spent a long time doing the first without much of the second.
Then I retired
People assume retirement is a full stop. For me it was the first time in decades that no one needed anything from me at eight in the morning.
And in that quiet I found I was not finished. Not remotely. I had one thing left that I had never done — something entirely mine, that existed because I decided it should.
So I started MYTHED. At an age when women are told to slow down, be sensible, enjoy the rest. I have enjoyed very little rest and I have no complaints. This is what I would like to do with the years I have.
Why clothing
Because we wear our identity before we ever get to explain it. I know this better than most — I spent a working life in a saree, and I understood exactly what it announced about me before I opened my mouth. Sometimes that served me. Sometimes it decided things about me I had not agreed to.
So MYTHED is a women-first brand, and I mean that plainly. Not women as a market segment. Women as the point.
Every piece starts with an emotion, and often an uncomfortable one — the things we manage privately and rarely say out loud. Being underestimated. Being the reliable one. Being told you are too much, and in the same week, not enough. I would like those truths to be wearable. I would like a woman to put one on and feel that somebody already knew.
We are all legends
You will see WORN BY THE LEGENDS on everything we make, and I want to be clear about what I mean by it, because it is not a slogan about fame.
A legend is not somebody in a history book. A legend is the woman who held a family together and never once got asked how she was doing it. The woman who went back to studying at forty. The woman who left. The woman who stayed and made it work on her own terms. The woman who is quietly rebuilding something right now and has told nobody yet.
I have been in rooms full of legends who had no idea that is what they were. That is who I am making this for.
If you are wearing MYTHED, I would like you to feel that somebody saw you. That is the whole of it.
Thank you for being here at the start of this.
Indrani Naskar
Founder, MYTHED
Read more about what we make and why in Our Philosophy, or explore DROP 001 — UNBOWED and DROP 002 — DURGA.