koaka collective

Koaka Collective is an intangible community and an intended idea working towards the union of culture, community and compassion through clothes and multidisciplinary projects. We believe that design has the power to change perspectives and alter culture. We intend on telling the real stories of our community without diluting or making it palatable to a global standard. Everything we do is a sensory and visual representation/recording of our everyday.

Garments from Koaka are metaphors, exploring the meaning and memory of a south asian and a south Indian diaspora. With the global movement of conversations raising around race, respresentation, and with the south Indian and south Asian culture merely used as an aesthetic, often appropriated and exploited and the conversation ending at it labelled as too ‘colorful’. Koaka demands you to look beyond it and find the layers and meanings behind every stroke of color and every over the top vibrance. Our garments challenge what is percieved as cool and what is not.

Koaka Collective is born in September 2021 in a small town in the south of india by damini mittai. Every creation is researched, designed and produced in our town with local indegenious communities with pre-existing skills which are passed down through generations. Our design systems are community driven, with everyone in the supply chain involved as collaborators and partners with a dynamic distribution of revenue.