We then moved to buying the cloth and stitching at home, then to getting clothes stitched by a tailor, to buying readymade clothes from brick-and-mortar shops where we could touch and feel a shirt before buying it, to now ordering our clothes online. Material literacy, similarly, is knowing enough about what goes into the making of products, so that we can make informed decisions about what and how much to buy. I’d like to see material literacy become a phrase we internalise, and maybe a movement for material labels similar to Label padhega India that gets people thinking about food labels.