Absolutely amazing; I agree with each line in his interview.
Every year when I try to do my next show, the first thing that comes to mind is ‘what next’. In a market like India where a look takes a long period to mature, to do a radical change every season is rather self-indulgent and almost silly. The kalidaar took seven or eight years to max and is still a potent seller. This year when I first started working on the collection, a big conscious decision was to visually simplify clothing and not care about what’s happening worldwide. I just needed to do fuss-free clothing after an overabundance of party frocks. Suddenly, a boring shift is the key to red carpet dressing.
Fashion is never about what you should do, fashion is about how you feel. So sometimes, when you want to break away from all the clutter because you feel claustrophobic, it could just be the next big thing. I am feeling cluttered in the Indian retail scenario. I have been a preacher of maximalism but you need to do maximalism beautifully. So much of Indian clothing in the retail market is inspired by what I do and that’s when I see ugly distortions of maximalism. I crave for a little bit of simplicity.
Let’s cut to Prada (queen of quirk) and Marni (princess of eclecticism), two of the most copied brands in the West, but suddenly when you see a woman in Bangkok wearing a bakelite statement necklace, quirk becomes a little quaky! When I look at Prada’s new shows, so simple that I wonder if it’s really Prada. But therein lies her triumph. And when the world finally starts to simplify, she would go into an incomprehensible stratosphere.
I have been feeling the need to simplify. Fashion week for me is sometimes to showcase clothes and sometimes to showcase merely an ideology and sometimes an amalgamation of both. These clothes will make such little impression that they can do nothing but create a long-lasting impression. It’s like finding a grey-haired beauty in a champagne brunch full of botoxed wiggles! People will try to find out what’s ‘designer’ about it.
To look at a design so grossly unrefined and to use a beautiful word the Internet has created: ‘fugly’. And what’s our stress? Take the F out of fugly and maybe in seven years we will start looking at something beautiful. In the meantime, we need to start working on making ugly better. So this fashion week, if you miss the sequins and the shenanigans, you might have missed the boat!
