The loops of teaching, learning, and resistance.

Ruchi Choudhary
Nov 21, 2025
4 min read

This essay is Part 2 of a two-part series on fashion as practice and rebellion. In Part 1, I revisited my teenage experiments: imperfect, messy, but deeply mine. Here, I turn to the present: the loops of teaching and learning, the radical refusal of consumer rules, and the shared ecosystems that grow in my atelier today.

Original Artickle

CHAPTER 1 — Field Notes From the Loop I sit on the sidelines a lot.

Not to supervise, but to listen.

And what I hear isn’t small talk.

It’s 12-year-old girls asking why they have to do more emotional labor than boys.

It’s boys saying “wait till you see us grow up” while girls fire back “we’re already stronger and smarter.”

It’s children mapping the world in categories as things girls can do, things boys can do and then poking at the edges of those boxes, almost mischievously.

Sometimes, it’s a debate about the rules of a game.

Not what the rules are, but who made them, and why.

What if the rules were different?” a child asked. And I thought: this is how we should all be thinking.

Not “these are the rules, so we obey,”

but “these are the rules, now let’s interrogate them.”

I hear girls forming vocabulary for feelings women my age learned to name only in our 20s.

I hear boys testing out gentleness.

I hear entire gender scripts bending under the weight of one simple question:

Why does it have to be that way?

And quietly, in those moments, I recognize myself.

Because this is exactly how I approach fashion.

CHAPTER 2 — The Mutual Ecosystem

We like to imagine mentorship as a one-way street where the older, wiser person poursknowledge into the younger one.

But my reality is something else entirely.

It isn’t hierarchy.

It is ecosystem.

I answer their questions and walk away with new questions of my own.
They challenge my blind spots.
I give them tools they didn’t know they could hold.

It isn’t linear. It’s a loop.

Fashion has its own rulebook too:

what’s acceptable, what’s stylish, what’s worth something, what counts as “craft,” what counts as “design,” who belongs and who gets visibility.

These rules are arbitrary, cultural, historical, and often capitalist.

And just as open to questioning as the games children rewrite on the playground.

When I say making is rebellion, this is what I mean.

Not rebellion against buying clothes, but rebellion against fashion as a performance.

A refusal to let fashion decide who you get to be.

Growing up, my access to fashion came from TV and film.

There was a boundary, however porous.

Kids today, though, are sold fashion as identity the minute they form thoughts.

Their feeds are curated to sell not just clothes, but entire selves.

So when someone at my first workshop said:

“You inspired me by not buying things.”

it stayed with me.

Because that was proof of something I have felt for years:

there is another way to exist in fashion.

A slower way.

A freer way.

A way that doesn’t involve performing anything for anyone.

In my living room atelier, someone can walk in with clothes they don’t like and walk out with something they love, not because it’s perfect but because they made it.

That’s where the loop lives.

That’s where fashion stops being about performing acceptability and starts being about making meaning.

CHAPTER 3 — Reviving Apprenticeship (A Model Everyone Else Abandoned)

Here is where I talk about apprentices.

Because I’ve realized something about myself:

I cannot do everything alone. And I shouldn’t.

I need help.

Not in a hierarchical way.

In a structured, reciprocal way.

And the word that ✨fits✨ the one that actually holds the meaning I want is apprenticeship.

Not internship.

Not assistantship.

Not “intern-for-exposure.”

Something older, slower, and more intentional.

Apprenticeship died because capitalism does not benefit from slowness.

Apprenticeship used to be the way knowledge passed through generations.

Through hands, over time, inside living rooms and small workshops.

Not classrooms or corporate structures.

Then it was replaced by internships, pipelines, and unpaid labor disguised as opportunity.

But I don’t want that.

And I don’t want to replicate that.

The work I do ~sewing, mending, listening, questioning, designing, hosting, building ecosystems~ needs a model that mirrors the loop I already live in.

Something like this:

I teach skills, tools, systems, and ways of thinking.
They bring fresh eyes, new cultural codes, new language.
We learn together inside a shared space.

It is a mutual exchange.

It protects my emotional labor.

It protects their boundaries.

It grows the ecosystem instead of draining it.

And I’m making it real with apprentices who will learn, create, and build alongside me.

I’ve always had didis in my life, women who shaped my thinking.

Now I am stepping into being that for others, intentionally.

But never as a hierarchy.

Always as a loop.

Apprenticeship is not about serving the master. It’s about growing the ecosystem.

The sewing café doesn’t exist yet.

But my living room atelier does.

And the ecosystem already lives there — in the afternoons where kids and teens come to make something, and maybe unmake a few assumptions along the way.

Teaching isn’t about giving answers.

It’s about creating conditions where each stitch, each question, each refusal becomes a radical act.

This is the work I want to expand.

This is the practice I want to formalise.

This is the model I want to revive.

The End (for now)

Fashion has always been political.

It has always told us who we should be, what we should desire, and how we should perform our identities.

But making is political too.

Mending is political.

Teaching is political.

Asking questions is political.