“IT’S AS COOL TO BE DIFFERENT AS IT IS TO FIT IN”
Masaba Gupta’s moment of truth came when she was playing a tennis match in Sangli, Maharashtra, and someone from the crowd shouted: ‘’You’re Viv Richards’ daughter. Get your game going. Don’t just wear fancy clothes.’’ She had been playing the game since she was eight and for her state for three years. She stopped, gave up completely. She was in Class 10. Now looking back at that time, one of India’s most fiercely individualistic designers says, “Tennis left me very bitter. I was so unhappy. I got so many chances, had so many great coaches. I was a great sportsman’s daughter. There was intense pressure. My dad was always with me, he was an active part of my life then. Everyone wanted a piece of me.”
She developed a sun allergy and even the joy of wearing fashionable tennis clothes wore off. She then drifted from Jamnabai Narsee School to Mithibai College, trying her hand at music at a school in Acton Town, London. “I was 16, living with nice friends of my mother (actor Neena Gupta, who went from one of the leading lights of seventies independent cinema to a popular TV actor/ director). But I was miserable. I missed my help, my dogs, my mom.”
She lasted six months there learning jazz, and another week at home in Mumbai before her mother asked her to do something with her life. A friend was taking the entrance exam at SNDT Women’s University for an undergraduate course in fashion and apparel design. Masaba did too, being good at sketching. So there she was learning knitting and crochet at SNDT. “I hated it,” she says. She was so bad at stitching that she failed, and her teachers gave up on her. Until there was a fashion show in the second year, Wendell Rodricks was one of the judges and her showstopper was deemed the most commercially viable. Big stores like Aza and Atosa called and she started working out of her room. The Generation Next applications for the Lakme Fashion Week 2009 Spring Summer opened, and she worked on her collection, designing from 5 am, going off to college at 7.30 am. She did six looks, getting her fabric printed in Jogeshwari. The collection did well. The unit below her house became a set-up on the second floor of her Juhu flat, with a master tailor, an assistant, her mother and her.
That was 2009. Now at 28, her label is eight years old, she has three standalone stores (two in Mumbai and one in Delhi), will add another three by year-end, sells in eight multi-label stores in five cities including Dubai, has 60 employees, and two separate offices for production (headed by a former strategist for start-ups) and design (headed by her). Her company is making an annual revenue of `12 crore, expected to be `20 crore by 2018. She also has a phenomenal social media following of almost five lakh followers on instagram, 1.1 million on Twitter and 50,000 on Facebook. She also has a super sharp ability to shut down trolls who question the “legitimacy” of her parents’ union.
Rodricks is a proud mentor today though he still recalls meeting her as a “child hiding behind Neena Gupta’s skirt”. He says he fell in love with her graduation collection sensibility of Africa meets Punjab and in many ways that boldness is what has been her greatest quality. A fearlessness which he believes will take her to international stardom. “I want to see her stores in Paris, London, New York, Milan and Tokyo,” he says. Already her trunk shows in cities as disparate as Dubai, Singapore and London are sold out. “In San Jose, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, they use Nalli saris to wrap their gods and mine to wear to parties,” says Masaba. She has introduced accessories for airport kiosks, a jewellery line, and has even worked with Lakme on lip colours. She has found her metier, going back to her striking colours, unusual prints and structured cuts. And in a fashion future where the accent is increasingly on distribution, affordability, price points, good retail chain and silhouette, she feels she is on a firm business footing. Fashion designer Gaurav Jai Gupta, her contemporary, says Masaba is a fun label and says the growth and fan base she has managed in such a short time is commendable.
She has also found domestic bliss, with husband of two years, Madhu Mantegna, one of the quartet behind Phantom Films (Anurag Kashyap, Vikas Bahl and Vikramaditya Motwane being the three directors). They live in a sea-facing house in Versova with their sadeyed beagle. She recently spent some time with her famous father in Antigua, and his twin brother, connected briefly with cousins, and lost 10 kilos. She has always been on the fringes of Bollywood, having grown up around actors Alia Bhatt, Sonam Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha, but has a serious problem with the way women are objectified in the industry—“I’ve been around creative producers on a film set who talk of women needing to put bum pads.” She has no ego, she says, but detests being treated badly, perhaps why she chickened out of designing costumes for films because unless you have a big Bollywood connect you are not treated well. “I believe you should go where you’re celebrated, where people are nice to you, where they want to work with you,” she adds, citing the example of her enormously talented mother, who still auditions for work, and will go where she is respected.
She laughs: “There’s this little activist in me who gets depressed, so I try and stay away from society parties where I am not required or just an unpaid extra. It should be as cool to be different as it is to fit in. You want to be run-of-the-mill, fine. You want to stand out, fine. I just focus on my fashion, my three-four close friends and family.” And create ever more compelling clothes for the woman who is opinionated, who thinks about what she’s wearing, who is comfortable in her own skin, who is not over the top, and yet stands out, who can walk into a room full of Swarovski-laden clothes and still make heads turn with her blocks of colour polished with gold or silver. A woman just like Masaba.
HER COMPANY IS MAKING AN ANNUAL REVENUE OF `12 CRORE, EXPECTED TO `20 BE CRORE BY 2018