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.

A good cloth does not always come when you want it. It comes when a mill runs long, or a finer order is left unclaimed — a length of Giza, of linen, of something woven better than it needed to be. We take it when it appears, and we make it up once. When a cloth is gone, it does not come again.

So MTSYA is not a season or a collection. It is a small, changing set of shirts, each cut from the best cloth we could find — in three fits, between ₹1,899 and ₹2,499 as the cloth asks. The shirt is made to last for years. Only the cloth is finite.

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