Do you know the story behind the koodai? Chances are, if you grew up in a South Indian household, you've held one without ever thinking twice about it — and that's exactly the kind of craft āsmi london exists to spotlight.
We are drawn to objects that were never designed to be admired, only to be used — and the koodai is one of the clearest examples of that. For decades it sat by kitchen doors and market stalls, completely unremarkable. Today, the same weave is showing up on global runways. We wanted to tell its real story, not just the trend version of it.
A Basket Older Than the Word "Trend"
Koodai simply means "basket" in Tamil, but the craft behind it goes back much further than the brightly coloured versions most people remember from childhood. The earliest koodais were woven from palmyra palm leaves — a material so central to South Indian life that the palmyra tree itself is often called a "tree of life," valued for its fruit, sap, and timber as much as its leaves. In regions like Chettinad, women would gather together, slicing and dyeing palm leaf strips before weaving them into baskets known as kottans or koodais — a craft learned the way most household skills are: by watching, not by instruction.
By the late twentieth century, the material itself had changed. Palm leaf gave way to plastic wire and tape — lighter, more durable, and far more weather-resistant. This wasn't a loss of tradition so much as a practical evolution; the weave, the pattern, and the knowledge stayed exactly the same, only the raw material adapted to what was available and useful. By the 1980s and 90s, these woven koodais were a fixture in nearly every Tamil household — carrying tiffin boxes to school, vegetables home from the market, and snacks to the beach. Nobody thought of it as craft. It was simply what you carried things in.
A Craft That Found Shelter in Unexpected Places
Like so many household crafts, koodai weaving was never formally taught or documented — it survived through repetition and inheritance rather than manuals or institutions. As younger generations moved toward different kinds of work, that chain of knowledge grew fragile, and for a while, the koodai began to quietly disappear from daily life.
What kept the craft alive was, in many cases, its adoption as a form of occupational practice within welfare homes and rehabilitation centres across Tamil Nadu — spaces where weaving had quietly persisted as both skill and therapy. One woman would remember a particular technique, another a pattern, and slowly, collectively, the knowledge came back together. The craft survived not in a museum case, but in the hands of women who simply kept weaving.
From Forgotten to Fashion-Forward
In the last few years, the koodai has had a remarkable second act. Designers and brands working directly with Tamil artisans have reframed the koodai as a design object in its own right — without stripping away its roots. Its chequered weave, bold colour, and boxy structure have since been spotted everywhere from street-style feeds to international runways, with major fashion houses producing their own raffia and woven-style totes clearly inspired by the same silhouette.
It's worth pausing on what that says. For a long time, crafts like this were viewed through a narrow, slightly exoticising lens — admired for texture and colour, but rarely credited for what they actually represented: generations of skill, resourcefulness, and a kind of intuitive sustainability that long predates the word "sustainable." The koodai's rise into global fashion is, in many ways, the industry finally catching up to a design logic that was already there.
That's the same belief that sits behind every piece in our own collection — that a craft doesn't need to be reinvented by someone else to be worthy of attention. It just needs to be seen properly, on its own terms.
The Koodai Tote, Made by Hand
Every Koodai Tote in our collection is handwoven from plastic wire by women in welfare homes and rehabilitation centres across Tamil Nadu — no factories, no machines, at any stage. The colours aren't dyed onto the surface; they're fixed directly into the weave itself, which is why they hold their brightness wash after wash, season after season. Each bag takes hours of hand-weaving to complete, and is lightweight, weatherproof, and entirely wipeable — built for actual daily use, not just for display.
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The Koodai Tote — Yellow Heart , Teal with Pink Heart , and Hot Pink Heart — the heart motif that has become something of a signature in the koodai's recent revival, here in three distinct colourways.
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The Koodai Tote — Lobster and Crabby — playful, slightly cheeky seaside motifs that lean into the koodai's long history as the bag you'd take to the market or the beach.
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The Koodai Tote — Madras Checks — a nod to one of South India's most iconic textile patterns, rendered here in woven wire instead of cloth.
Carry it to the farmers' market, the school run, or just because it's beautiful — the same way it's been carried for generations, just with a few more eyes on it now.
Explore the full range in our Tote Bags collection .