Those disrupting Indian fashion are its new stars

“The sexiest people are thinkers. Nobody’s interested in somebody who’s just vain with a hole in their head, talking about the latest thing — there is no latest thing. It’s all rubbish.”

- Vivienne Westwood, British fashion designer

Experiences, the rough edges, the splatter of paint, the broken blocks, the grime and the dust, are seared into the clothes, which are a visual chronicle of his own beliefs that are perhaps too futuristic and ahead of times in a country still venerating the kitsch. He cuts with élan and the scissors seem to follow the trajectory of his thinking.

Perhaps nobody else here can cut patterns like him, or do drapes that are break the imposition of gender on a society still coming to terms with women’s assertion of their rights. The reclusive designer Arjun Saluja whose body of work is as intimidating as the man himself is a maverick who is not afraid of challenging the construct of identities based on gender or ideas. His work dismisses the notions of pretty and fragile. It is all about crossovers and confusions.

For his last collection, he had taken the idea of "broken bride" as the inspiration. Marriage is transactional, he says.

Fashion, in order to make sense, must be political and social. It can’t be in isolation, a celebration of "pretty" only. Designing in a country with its ever changing and disruptive landscape can’t be in isolation of all that is "us". Fashion is a medium, an expression and a commentary. Like poetry. Storytelling is essential for fashion. A narrative is important for connections.

Saluja, who trained at Philadelphia College of Textiles, says his techniques are a study in deconstruction. “The world closes in, and the process of turning inwards is where you know you are all what you got. Broken things are beautiful. We have tried to merge stories, and experiences of the grandeur of everyday survival. It is an invocation of the street, its aggression, and transgressions, and the code of survival in the framework for negotiating respect through appearance,” he says.

You could call him an anarchist in the way he has stood for his work which have silhouettes that fuse an anarkali with a trouser and a sherwani, or a military cut shirt paired with sharara.

Our age is of checkpoints. You stop at each and demolish the previous, move on to break the rhythm of the songs, and embrace the jarring notes, he says.

“For so long that I have watched the streets - Philadelphia's inner city, New York City, London, and Delhi - I have seen the children learning foraging for food, learning to fend for themselves, fighting addictions, embracing it, doing whatever works. The street is tough. It is mean. You "come up hard."

That means you harness every resource that you have in order to deal with life, and in order to survive. It returns you to the primeval instinct. That's what we have used in our collection. The idea of using wool, and the idea of using leather is to communicate the need for self-protection,” he says. One of his earlier collections was inspired by Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis, who had said: “Woman and man are words other people use, not me. I’m not sure what I am. Some days I’m neither, or I’m nothing. On other days I feel I’m both... Well, I’m both...” Saluja was hailed by Elle magazine in 2006 as one of the hottest designers in India.

He called his 2012 collection "No Ground Beneath My Feet" and the collection note said, "I don’t remember my home. You mean where I was born? That was a long time ago. History. You could say I don’t belong anywhere. You could say I belong everywhere. Circumstances have made me my creature. People, places, languages, they change and I make them all mine... My garment is my struggle between my roots and my environment. You see, I come here as one person but leave as another."

When he was much younger, Saluja wandered the streets of New York City being part of the subcultures that revolved around people’s identities. Those days were about confusion and consequent assertion of identity. It wasn’t about fitting in. It was all about curiosity. That’s what has carried forward. He once saw the singer Prince in his furs sitting at a bar.

“Fully opulent,” he described him.

He remembers Lenox Lounge, a jazz bar in Harlem, and the various lounges where mujra performances took place. His design process involves watching alternative films. For instance, Kurosawa gave birth to the idea of the Hakama pant and sari.Saluja had wanted to be a theatre artist.

“You would see [the singer] Bjork sitting in a cafe. The independence of these cities shaped me. It allowed you to be alone,” he says about London.

This was before those planes struck NYC’s twin towers. Later, the cities changed. It made him sad. He was retailing at stores like Anthropologie in NYC, but he returned to India in 2005 and launched his label Rishta.

Unlike many others, Saluja has never believed in “sexifying” women or men. He deals with sensuality, not sexuality, he says. Saluja had wanted to be a theatre artist and this is where the drama in his design comes from. He is fascinated with shapes, lines and industrial design at his father’s flour mill in Bareilly.

The androgyny that he experienced working in Patricia Fields’ salon (he designed for the TV series Sex and the City, and Fields was the stylist for its main character Carrie Bradshaw), is what drives his work. He started with taking his label Rishta to New York before he launched in India to show the Indian silhouettes as a movement against embellishment and surface ornamentation and show the cuts from India, which is what Saluja’s skills are about.

In Japan, his label sold to Henri Bendel and in New York at the prestigious Barney’s. “That’s how we started out. He later returned to India and brought his label along after 9/11 happened, which led to a slump in orders,” he says. But for designers like Saluja and Datta, who specialise in pattern cutting, India is a tough market because of non-acceptance in terms of unusual forms and silhouettes, which is what holds such talent back. Saluja has also developed his own language in Indian wear, which he launched as part of the Lakme India Fashion Week this year. It is an alternative take on silhouettes but one that is experimental and speaks of highly developed skills in pattern cutting, which is rare in India.

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For Saluja, a garment must trigger an emotional response. The zip placements are symbolic of opening up of layers, he says. That’s how he constructs. His clothes can make or break you. They aren’t for those seeking to be pretty. For beyond the notions of pretty, there’s a whole world of ideas. He creates with ideas.

It is the experience of that survival that inspires his collection, which derives their meaning from the streets.

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That he is a disruptor would be an understatement for what he has stood for all along. In the Indian fashion landscape, disruptors are important to break the complacency of kitsch, the known selling points of ornamentation here.

But subversion is an art. Destruction requires discipline. John Galliano did it. Yohji Yamamato took kimonos and broke their pattern, deconstructed the silhouette and dug through the archives for inspiration. We have a wealth of such drapes and silhouettes here. Why must we rely on Western fashion forecasts and copy the boxy silhouettes to fall in line?

And the story of Indian fashion must also move beyond to silhouettes from only textiles. That would be the greatest filter for now. Right now, there’s too much clutter. There’s a lot of noise about handmade. But fashion system needs more newly programmed clothes.

In Indian fashion, as we move towards more international styling, the trick is to copy in the name of inspiration. What Vetements Official did with their work was original. The idea of collectives is not new but here, collaborations haven’t been worked upon. In the way of collaborations, we have only seen jewelry designers and apparel designers working together but that runs into its own issues of credit, et al.

We are quick to put on pedestal the next emerging talent. We don’t wait long enough to see them define their signature style. Bukowski quotes or cool one-liners on jackets with models wearing the disconsolate look is straight out of Paris and New York runways. It is so last season. The kings and queens of androgyny here are mostly plagiarists. The fashion media isn’t critiquing work here. They are only sourcing for splashes in the fashion magazines.

That’s why real talent gets ignored. If Rahul Mishra, who is perhaps the most successful designer out of India and has a regular show at the Paris runway, wasn’t noticed by the French Federation’s president in 2009 who offered him Paris runway, India would not be a name to reckon with in international fashion scene. It wasn’t until 2014 that Rahul Mishra started with his Paris runway debut and moved through the slots to find one of the most coveted ones between Hermes and Miu Miu and in the same slot as John Galliano once showed. He says he wasn’t ready for the world stage in 2009.

And once he was, he sought out the man and said he could come up with a collection in two months. We have others who tried Paris but couldn’t sustain its brutal fashion judgment. Manish Arora is there but in terms of reviews, he has often been relegated to kitsch as if India was just that. His bright colours, the motifs, the embroidery are on just one shade of the spectrum. We also have indigo, beige and grays.

Mishra has been reviewed by Suzy Menkes of Vogue and he says the international fashion media now wants to come to India to test its potential. In fact, in Paris, he has often overheard the fashion critics say the next big fashion name will be out of India.

The non-conformist

"I mean, Adam and Eve found that quick enough—that clothes are totems of simultaneous confession and disguise. They are masks that unmask you..."- Tom Junod

It is a colour freeze. The pale green clashes with the bronze gold. The liquid gold and the steel silver textiles represented the audacity of sparks and motion. If teleportation could be used as a design adjective, Gaurav Jai Gupta’s latest show called Pingala at the recently-concluded Amazon India Fashion Week bordered on just that. It was a colour freeze. The pale green clashed with the bronze gold. His handwoven liquid textiles are intimidating to the uninitiated.

In the icy green, there was vulnerability. In the bronze gold, the strength bounced back. It is a cycle of rebounds. Every rebound leads to a revelation. He doesn't care if the world doesn’t acknowledge his commitment to his work. He weaves in everything - political, social and emotional. The threads juxtaposed with zari are his medium. His clothes aren't for everyone and definitely not for the fragile. They almost demand that you be aware of what they stand for. Very few can get past the literal to move into abstraction. But Gupta’s label Akaaro has always been a timeless concept. It is like seasons have extinguished themselves in liquid forms of glazed and diluted metal.

Always there must be conflict of personality with the clothes. His handwoven liquid textiles are intimidating.Gupta, who calls himself a weaver, says his design philosophy is abstract. The intellectual vocabulary aside, the silhouettes were neat and minimal, the editing crisp and the textiles untouched with embroidery. One of the strongest collections this season, it used 37 looks where the textiles became the medium of expression.

The paleness and the coldness of green are European in sensibility. But the red and the yellow stand for his own interpretation of celebration from the series of paintings on Ashtnayika, which inspired his latest collection’s design and colour palette.

“It isn’t gimmicky. We are not doing theatrics. My work has vulnerability. That's how a designer makes a difference to his work,” Gupta says.

“My show is about political and hyper chaos.”

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Riding the wave of textiles with Rahul Mishra, who now showcases at the Paris Fashion Week and says his work represents everything Made in India, Indian fashion is now ready for the world with its handloom pitch. These are the avant garde textiles woven by weavers in villages. The new avatar has international appeal and at least two designers – Suket Dhir and Rahul Mishra – have walked away with International Woolmark Prize for their menswear and womenswear collection in 2016 and 2014 respectively.

And if Rahul Mishra’s collection at the Paris runway, the most coveted runway in the world, which is almost the graduation of all fashion weeks where brands like Hermes, Dior and Miu Miu showcase their visions, was called the fourth dimension, Gupta’s innovative textiles could very well be in the fifth dimension.

Beyond the three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time, the fifth dimension is all about abstraction and for many, a legitimate construct. While Mishra calls fourth dimension love, the reclusive designer from Rohtak says his work is the new reality and encompasses peace, love and joy.

At the latest Amazon India Fashion Week Spring/Summer, the designer, who won accolades at the last season for his conceptual work called Mumuksha, which means “one who is curious for ultimate knowledge”, his collection called Pingala, which is again a spiritual term indicative of his own interpretation of state of the world and the eventual celebration of life as the only way to conquer the dark, which he understands well, showed 37 clean silhouettes made of radiant textiles.

He is not afraid of being abstract and perhaps the intellectual vocabulary didn’t find resonance with the fashion press which is loathe to delve into the narratives and plays favorites and hence the jaded looks not supported with concepts, Gupta’s timeless textiles are the classic case of an underdog. He lost at the Woolmark but those who understand his work say he deserved it the most.

His last collection showed handwoven reversible fabrics developed into fine blends of wool that established him as a forerunner in the textile movement that has become India fashion’s narrative with the pitch that only the textiles can be the savior and the way forward. This is not an overstatement.

Gupta wasn’t part of the entourage on the National Handloom Day that headed to Varanasi led by the spirited new textiles minister Smriti Irani to announce government’s commitment towards its weavers and to acknowledge the design intervention in the clusters to make handloom aspirational.

But he has always called himself the child of struggle. Gupta's brand Akaaro is mostly about textiles. In the large hall, there is a loom with colorful threads. The warp is almost always grey.

All these years when he was developing textiles, he was looking for acknowledgment but his work was dismissed as lacking in aesthetics in terms of structure, drape, and cuts.

Last week was the first time ever that the designer walked the ramp. He says part of growing as a designer is to grow simpler.As a child, he says, he could dream with sound and image and now, he designs with beats.

He is more dismissive of people now. It is the audacity of recognition. It is justified.

Gupta attended NIFT in Delhi, and later went to London to finish his degree in textiles.

“The simpler you can make your work, the stronger it becomes. It is in sync with life. I think Indian Fashion is going through interesting times. Ours is the story of drape. Our story is textiles. It is about flow and not structure. Indian fashion is most provocative and evocative. But we must keep history and design separate,” he says. “I want to deal with metaphors. My work is a quest. It is political. It is everything.”

The unapologetic

“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.”- Thomas Woolfe

When Samant Chauhan's mother attended his graduation project in 2004 at NIFT Delhi, and saw his collection that he made with Bhagalpuri silk, she exclaimed why he had not used colours like others. Why had he worked with the coarse silk, she asked. The designer from Bihar was awarded for his collection, and when in 2005 Chauhan showcased his collection in Singapore, many say it was the new millennium’s turning point in handloom fashion. Before him, there were reference points – Neeru Kumar and David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore of A&T. But the young knitwear designer was a nostalgist who wanted to explore the regionalisation of Buddhsim and drapeability of the fabric.

In 2006, he earned the membership of FDCI.

Chauhan was invited to London Fashion Week to present his collection in 2008, and by 2012 he had launched his label Rajputana. He developed the silk and mixed it with cotton, and other textiles to create a couture line, which now has a dedicated customer base. A low-profile designer, he doesn't tag his collections with the handloom tag. He says he did what he could.

He is still doing what he can to work with Bhagalpuri textiles.

"Textiles have made me. You can't sell on sympathy or pride. People don't buy the sob story. They can donate for charity but they won't pay for the story," he says. “We can only hope. My ambition is to open a factory in Bhagalpur where I can process from yarn to a finished piece of clothing. I want to live there, work there and see what possibilities the Bhagalpuri silk can give me.”

The Believer

“Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.”

Stephen Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes

The designer himself describes fourth dimension as love. Beyond the spatial concepts that encompass three dimensions that we are familiar with, time is another reality that can be felt and experienced. So is love, Rahul Mishra says. That’s what his last collection in Paris was about. It led Menkes to review it and call handcraft as the fourth dimension.

Reviewing Mishra’s Fourth Dimension, she wrote, “But this Indian designer is instead creating shapely, western silhouettes, a button-through shirtdress, say. He then adds an exceptional fabric treatment, hand-worked lace, perhaps in a curve, to combine ancient craft with clothing for today.”The 3D embroidery had been done in Baundpur in West Bengal where the designer runs a Ghar Wapsi scheme for slum dwellers who have been forced to migrate to Mumbai to find employment. Under this scheme, the designer has promised them employment to the former Dharavi slum dwellers so they can stay back in their villages. This is his commitment to his design philosophy. So far, he has resettled around 200 artisans back in their villages.

“We must create design systems and not just products,” he says.

Hailing from Malhausi in UP, the designer studied at NID and later at Instituto Marangoni in Milan and then worked first with weavers in Kerala and moved to other clusters. His crosses over with ease. That’s why Mishra is perhaps the biggest name in fashion out of India because in two years from selling in six stores worldwide, he now sells in more than 45 in just two years. He has six Paris fashion weeks and has moved up in terms of slots.

He works with about 700-800 people and supplies to all top shops in the world including ones in Copenhagen and Japan. The craft development is from Kerala, Orissa for Ikat, Andhra for Pochampalli. We have worked with Patan Patola and we have worked with kota from Rajasthan and Daccai among other things. We have been working with Bhagalpuri silk and Chanderi and Maheshwari Khadi. Then, there are other craft clusters like shawl weaving from Bhuj.

Next destination for the designer is Northeast. Even Samant Chauhan, whose commitment to Bhalgalpuri silk in commendable for the designer has worked with the coarse textiles for more than 11 years, is now exploring Muga Silk in Assam as part of a government project to see how designers can work with the textiles to create aspirational fashion.

Mishra had the courage to stick to handloom and handcraft from when he first started out in 2006 and take it to the next level by reinventing textiles in a way that they could resonate with international sensibilities and yet did not lose out on their essential identity. He mixed wool with Chanderi and his Tree of Life embroidery for his International Woolmark collection made him stand out among the rest.

Mishra says nothing is more empowering than fashion and design in creating ecosystems where weavers can benefit and dignity of labour can be created.

About 34 million in India do crafts, and the designer is currently working to create economies of scale in handloom so it becomes more accessible.

“Always the ideas must be grand. We need believers. They are the foot soldiers. A general doesn't win the war,” he says.

The grand aim then is not to be the toast of the world but to leave a legacy behind. They are doing just that. They are weaving and cutting their own narratives. Unabashed and unstoppable.

In many ways, these young designers are collapsing the idea of Kitsch, which had become synonymous with Indian fashion. But the new alternative lot, including Suket Dhir, the NIFT graduate, who grew up in Punjab, Delhi, and Dehradun, and was pitched against the finest - USA’s Siki Im, Australia’s P.Johnson, South Korea’s Munsoo Kwon, Jonathan Christopher from the Netherlands, and London’s Agi & Sam at the International Woolmark competition and walked away with the prize this year.

With Dhir, the superpowers of world fashion accepted the change in the aesthetic order. The yellow had beaten the grey. Finally.