Thirty-four years, five failures, one word
Lallari is a Punjabi word for a fabric dyer. It took a textile designer five years of failed indigo harvests before he'd earned the right to use the word.
1994 – 2000 · Lahore
Fresh out of NCA Lahore, Ijaz Hussain spent seven years as a CAD consultant in Pakistan's textile industry — synthetic dye only, designs imported from Europe, designers as technical executors. He attended a UNESCO natural-dye workshop at NCA in 1998, but the idea had nowhere to go yet. In 2000 he left, back to the academy to recover what the industry had erased.
2004 · NCA, Lahore
A fifteen-day workshop with Japanese master dyer Yamazaki Momomaro changed the direction entirely — not a technique, but a philosophy: that a dyer's relationship to plant, soil, season and water is the work's creative and ethical foundation.
With Yamazaki Momomaro (far left), Gulberg, Lahore.2004 – 2009 · Near Lahore
Indigo hadn't grown in Punjab for a century — wiped out within two decades of BASF's 1897 synthetic breakthrough. No seed, no local knowledge, nothing to relearn from. Seed had to be imported from India; germination and fermentation failed, repeatedly, for five straight years. In 2009 it finally worked: the first successful indigo harvest and extraction near Lahore.
2009 – 2012 · Karachi → Lahore
The first harvest debuted at Expo Center, Karachi, under a placeholder name: Studio BKR. In 2012 it was renamed Lallari — Punjabi for a fabric dyer. Not a coined name. A word that already meant exactly what the work was.
2007 – 2021 · Jamshoro, Sindh
Alongside Lallari, Ijaz built the Textile Design Department at SABS University, Jamshoro as its Head from 2007 to 2021 — screen printing, textile CAD, digital printing and embroidery studios from the ground up, with natural dyeing as a core discipline. Its laser and CNC equipment now cuts Lallari's blocks in-house, in service of a process that stays entirely hand-stamped.
Today · Punjab & Sindh
Cultivation and printing near Lahore is led by Muhammad Abu Bakar, an NCA Fine Arts graduate in printmaking, alongside textile designer Muhammad Abdullah Mushtaq on the Lahore team. Design and international market development run from Sindh, with textile designer Syeda Rabiya Fatima Zaidi of SABS University. Punjab grows it, both provinces print it — no border on the craft itself.
A deliberate limit
The studio can run digital fabric printing. It chooses not to. Natural indigo is living, biological chemistry; digital printing is synthetic precision. The two don't mix — technology serves the block here, never the dye.
“Every vat ferments on its own clock. Every block wears a little differently. What you buy was never meant to match the last piece — that's not a flaw in the process, it's the whole point of it.”
Who builds this
Ijaz Hussain
Founder · Design & International Market
NCA Lahore graduate in Textile Design (M.A. Multimedia Arts). Seven years in industry, seven as Assistant Professor at NCA, and Head of Textile Design at SABS University, Jamshoro from 2007 to 2021.
Muhammad Abu Bakar
Cultivation, Design & Production · Lahore Team
Fine Arts graduate of the National College of Arts, Lahore, majoring in printmaking. Manages Lallari's indigo cultivation near Lahore and works across design, product development and production.
Syeda Rabiya Fatima Zaidi
Textile Designer · Sindh Team
Textile design graduate of SABS University, Jamshoro, working across design, product development and production alongside the studio's Sindh team.
Muhammad Abdullah Mushtaq
Textile Designer · Lahore Team
Textile design graduate of SABS University, Jamshoro, working across design, product development and production alongside the studio's Lahore team.
Every piece in the shop was dyed by this same studio, in this same slow sequence.
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