A Letter From Our Founder: What Rishikesh Taught Me About Everything We Were Getting Wrong about yoga clothes

A story of why Tishya exists.

Key Takeaways

• The flaws in modern yoga wear are not theoretical. They were witnessed, documented, and felt firsthand, by practitioners who had spent decades on the mat and knew, with quiet certainty, that something was deeply wrong.

• The smallest details in clothing, a seam placed one centimetre too high, a waistband one thread too tight, accumulate across an hour of practice into a significant interruption of presence.

• Tishya was not designed at a desk. It was designed on a mat, in conversation with people who had given their lives to the practice it serves.

Rishikesh. Dawn. The Ganges Moving Quietly Below.

I did not go to Rishikesh to start a clothing brand. I went because I needed to understand something that had been bothering me for years, a quiet dissatisfaction I could not quite articulate, seated somewhere between my practice and my wardrobe. I had tried every brand. Spent more than I care to admit on garments that promised everything and delivered, reliably, a version of everything that fell just slightly short of what I actually needed on the mat.

I suspected the problem was the clothing. Rishikesh confirmed it beyond any doubt.

When Experience Speaks, It Speaks in Detail

The yoga teachers of Rishikesh are not influencers. They are not brand ambassadors. They are men and women who have practiced for twenty, thirty, forty years, who teach because the practice changed their lives so completely that sharing it became the only logical response.

I spent weeks in their company. I asked them, directly and without agenda, what bothered them about the clothing available to practitioners today. What I expected were general observations. What I received were extraordinarily specific ones.

"The waistband sits exactly where the breath needs to release," one teacher told me, pressing two fingers just below her navel. "Every time I cue my students to soften the belly, I watch them fighting their own clothing."

Another, a man who had practiced Ashtanga for thirty years, described the sensation of synthetic fabric during long meditation holds. "By the end, the skin feels starved," he said. "Like it has been covered rather than clothed."

A third showed me the marks left by a sports bra strap across her shoulder at the end of a three-hour practice. Small. Almost invisible. Entirely unacceptable.

I wrote everything down. Every complaint, every observation, every small and specific and entirely reasonable thing that the clothing industry had failed to consider. I filled a notebook. Then most of another.

And then I went home and started again from the beginning.

The Tiny Things That Change Everything

What follows is not a marketing list. It is an accounting of every small decision made in the design of a Tishya garment, each one traceable to a specific conversation, a specific observation, a specific moment of clarity on a mat in Rishikesh.

The seams. Conventional garment construction places seams where they are structurally convenient. In yoga, structural convenience and physical comfort are rarely the same thing. A seam running down the inner thigh becomes a pressure point in a deep hip opener. A seam across the upper back announces itself in every forward fold. At Tishya, every seam placement was mapped against actual poses, moved, reconsidered, and moved again until it occupied the one position where it would never be felt.

The waistband. It sits lower than you expect. Deliberately, precisely lower, positioned below the navel, where the body's natural breath cycle has room to complete itself fully. This is not a stylistic choice. It is a physiological one, arrived at after watching, repeatedly, the way a high waistband interrupts the exhale in a forward fold.

The fabric weight. Light enough to forget. Substantial enough to drape with intention rather than cling with desperation. The particular weight of Tishya khadi was arrived at through many iterations, too light and the fabric loses its graceful fall; too heavy and it becomes a presence rather than an absence. The balance, when found, was unmistakable.

The sleeve and shoulder construction. Arms move through an extraordinary range in yoga, overhead, behind the back, across the body, below the hips in an inversion. The shoulder seam of a Tishya top is set slightly further back than conventional tailoring would place it, creating unobstructed freedom through the full arc of arm movement without the fabric pulling across the chest or riding up at the back.

The length. Every Tishya top is cut to remain in place through an inversion. Not through elastication or gripping fabric, but through considered proportion, long enough that even in a headstand, even in a deep forward fold with arms extended, the fabric stays where it belongs and the mind stays where it needs to be.

The fabric itself. Khadi breathes because of the way it is made, hand-spun fibres with a natural irregularity that creates microscopic channels of airflow against the skin. During a long meditation, when the body grows still and the skin's need for air becomes almost meditative in itself, this quality is not an abstraction. It is felt, quietly and continuously, as a kind of ease.

What Rishikesh Gave Me

It gave me a notebook full of problems worth solving. It gave me teachers whose decades of experience were more valuable than any focus group or trend report. And it gave me something harder to quantify, a clarity of purpose that has not wavered since.

Tishya is not a yoga brand that happens to choose natural fabrics. It is a response to a specific, documented, deeply felt failure of the industry to serve the people who practice most seriously.

Every piece we make carries the memory of those conversations. The teacher with the strap marks on her shoulder. The student fighting her waistband through an exhale. The practitioner who described synthetic fabric, with quiet precision, as feeling like being covered rather than clothed.

We heard them. We came home. We made something better.

For the Woman Who Has Been Practicing Long Enough to Know

You already know what I am describing. You have felt the waistband. The seam. The fabric that traps warmth in the final minutes of Savasana when the body simply wants to release everything and cannot, quite, because something is in the way.

You have, perhaps, made peace with it, decided that this is simply the compromise required, that no clothing could be designed with the kind of attention that practice truly deserves.

Tishya exists to tell you, with great respect and absolute conviction, that you were wrong to settle. The practice deserves better. And now, finally, it has it.

Made with devotion. Worn with intention. Designed, in every last detail, for the mat.

• The Founder, Tishya