100Hands

<p>The name is an audit: roughly a hundred pairs of hands touch each shirt before it leaves the atelier. 100Hands was founded in 2014 by Akshat and Varvara Jain — two Amsterdam investment bankers who walked away from finance to build a shirt company on top of Akshat's family trade, a cotton-spinning and yarn business in Amritsar that has run for more than a hundred and sixty years across six generations. The shirts are made outside Amritsar; the standards were set to embarrass Europe.</p><p>The embarrassment worked. A buttonhole at 100Hands takes some forty minutes of hand-sewing that other makers finish in three or four, and the house's Gold Line sits at the very top of what handwork can do to a shirt. Savile Row tailors began quietly commissioning from them; then came Harrods and Bergdorf Goodman; then a store of their own on Savile Row itself — the first non-British name on the golden mile.</p><p>What makes the story matter is the direction of travel. Luxury shirting's passport was Italian or British for a century. 100Hands, audited by the Fair Wear Foundation and employing hundreds of artisans in Punjab, made "Made in India" a claim of superiority rather than an apology — one forty-minute buttonhole at a time.</p>