The story behind AJ Wallace

I spent years hiding.

Now I make clothes for people who no longer want to live in the shadows.

It started with offcuts

In Bhopal, India, where I grew up, there was a tailor on almost every corner. Women bought fabric at the local market and had it sewn to fit. While the grown-ups talked, I picked up the scraps from the floor. At home I cut and stitched them by hand into tiny clothes for my Barbie doll.

I didn’t know it then, but that was where AJ Wallace began.

Walking against the wind

No boy at my school had ever chosen fashion design. Not in my year, and not in the generations before me. Choosing it felt like walking into the wind.

I studied knitwear design at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Mumbai, the most technical corner of fashion. I then did two Masters of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar: one in Product Design, and one in Designing for Social Innovation.

At university, a professor once asked the class who they thought would become a major designer. Most of them said my name. I’m still working towards seeing what they saw.

Why nothing here is made twice

For a long time I hid. I was scared of how people would react to who I was. Then one day I stopped hiding.

AJ Wallace is built on that moment. Every piece is one of a kind. It is made once and never repeated. These clothes aren’t made to help you blend in. They’re made so you can stop hiding.

When you put on one of my coats, dresses or shirts, I want you to feel bigger than whatever has been pinning you down.

The hands behind every piece

Every garment is hand-block printed, hand-dyed, and hand-sewn by my artisans in India. They use techniques passed down for centuries. If a line is slightly uneven or a print shifts, that’s the mark of a person’s hand. No machine can copy it.

I pay fair wages, and I know every person in my supply chain by name. I know what it feels like to build something alone, with no one noticing your work. I don’t want anyone who makes AJ Wallace to feel that way. The printer, the dyer and the tailor matter as much as the designer.

These crafts are worth preserving, the way we preserve artefacts. So are the people who carry them.

Where we’re going

In India, when a woman is in a hard situation, and someone asks why she doesn’t leave, she often answers with two questions. Where would I go? What would I do?

I want to answer those questions. My dream is to open care centres in India: places where women can come to work, learn crafts and support each other.

Every piece you buy brings us a step closer.

Anurag Wallace, founder and designer,
AJ Wallace