the story

There was a deluge. A boat was carried through it, tied to the horn of a fish, and what the boat carried became the world.

MTSYA is named for Matsya — the first avatar of Vishnu, the fish that guided Manu’s boat through the flood. The name is set without its vowels. In older Indian grammar the vowels are breath and the consonants are bone; strip the breath and only the structure remains. You supply the breath when you read it aloud: mat-syaa.

We make shirts, and we begin with shirts because it is the thing we know how to do properly. Linen woven with cotton for the plain ones. Indian Oxford, yarn-dyed on the loom, for the stripes and the checks. Cloth chosen because it is good. Everything is made in India.

The patterns are not decoration. A stripe is rain, and rain falls, so it runs down the shirt and never across it. A check is the lattice — the planking of the boat, the net Manu tied — so it stays square and even, and never becomes a plaid. On every shirt the fish is stitched small at the chest, in one colour, and left at that.

This is not minimalism. Minimalism is a style, and styles change. This is something older. This is what the fish carried in the boat.

— mtsya