Haute Heritage
This new season, designers are tweaking TRADITIONAL STYLES that have been handed down the generations to create CONTEMPORARY ENSEMBLES. By Peter d’Ascoli
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Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening.”
O–Coco Chanel
ne of the things that fascinates me about Indian style is the profound influence traditional textiles and regional costumes have on modern fashion. Each day, millions of people across the country continue to make and wear traditional garments that use crafts handed down the generations. And, while many customs are disappearing in our cities, agrarian lifestyles in the hinterland still produce artefacts encoded with symbols and meaning. These age-old arts form a powerful aesthetic heritage that occupies a part of every Indian’s psyche, and even the most sophisticated city dwellers carry within their collective consciousness some degree of India’s shared legacy. It’s no wonder then that this artistic inheritance consistently influences contemporary designers.
It was trailblazers such as Ritu Kumar and Rohit Khosla who pioneered the use of classic handicrafts in contemporary fashion decades ago. “India has a unique connect with its traditional textile history that has not been forgotten by the mechanised production of garments,” says Kumar, who has been reviving crafts and mixing them with contemporary styles since 1969. “The Ritu Kumar LABEL line tries to redefine crafts by contemporising fabrics and shapes to suit a more mobile, younger audience.”
This season we see designers heeding the impulse to draw on this heritage, but this time the trend has coalesced around Gujarat as runways were swamped with styles inspired by the craft-rich district of Kutch. “Thank God there are clear trends emerging at last,” declares James Ferreira, the designer known for his use of natural fabrics and contemporary silhouettes. “I look at traditional pieces and tweak them, like enlarging bandhani tie-dye motifs until they become modern, or shortening the ghagra skirt.”
In one of the season’s sharpest collections, designer duo David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore of Abraham & Thakore have created chic looks with their austere colour palette, modern silhouettes, and bold use of traditional textile techniques. “We used bandhani tie- dye, mirror work, and rabari embroidery of the traditional people of Kutch, for our fabrics,” says Abraham. He points to the duo’s use of the choli, the classic blouse that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years, as an example of a synthesis between the old and new. “The backless choli —the incredibly seductive blouse of Gujarat —inspired us to create several bare-backed dresses for Fall 2012, bringing it from rural daywear to the urban cocktail hour.”
Aneeth Arora, whose Péro brand is coveted by fashion insiders globally for its glamorous boho-gypsy style, considers ethnic traditions the foundation of her design vocabulary. “I’ve always been inspired by the costumes of locals. Péro is all about mixing traditional, handmade textiles to create unique clothing that is impossible to mass produce.”
Avant-garde label 11.11/CellDSGN experiments with tradition in textile developments in Gujarat. “We act as curators, using multiple crafts from different regions,” says co-founder Shani Himanshu. “When we introduced new techniques such as marbledyeing and juxtaposed it with the age-old practice of bandhani, the vision of the craftsmen changed, and they saw that we were creating something to suit a contemporary market.”
For Anju Modi, who has worked in Gujarat for over two decades, it was her research for costumes for an upcoming film by Sanjay Leela Bhansali that led her to focus on Kutch this season. “When I think of the craftsmen of Kutch, particularly the women who make rabari bharat, the fine traditional embroidery, the Urdu word hunar comes to mind,” says Modi. “Hunar means to obtain or acquire an artful skill through devotion and practice. These craftsmen create work that has been refined over generations.”
This respect for hunar and the crafts community that embodies it is, for me, central to understanding Indian style in an industry known for disregarding the old in favour of the new. As a modern fashion industry emerges to serve our growing consumerism, we can see something unique happening. India’s creative leaders are forging a path that does not reject tradition, but incorporates the deeply rooted aesthetic heritage into the fast-paced, trend-oriented, contemporary fashion process. The result is something original.