OH! CALCUTTA!

Sandwiched between other designers who showed Bollywood-style getups on models strutting to booming film music, Joy Mitra’s presentation at the Splendid India Closet event was memorable for its restraint. That’s not a quality one typically associates with Indian fashion.

The designer took inspiration from Devdas, a novel set in nineteenth-century Calcutta that has spawned several well-known film adaptations, most recently a blockbuster starring Aishwarya Rai and Shahrukh Khan. The models wore billowing ankle-length skirts and pantaloons with short, fitted blouses that buttoned up the back, and sheer draped shawls. Each piece was in a strong, saturated hue with subdued, coppery undertones, and was mixed with pieces in contrasting colors. The combinations were unforgettable: tangerine orange with peacock blue, mustard yellow with burgundy, teal with chocolate brown. The fabrics were embellished with gold seed beads and lines of embroidery in delicate, traditional motifs. But this ornament didn’t have the bright yellow shine of typical zari. Insted it reminded me of gold jewelry that has been worn for decades – dull, mottled, with all the polish worn away.

The models carried cloth purses, puckered like dumplings, on colored cords from their wrists, wore little embroidered patches in their hair, and held their heads high, staring somberly into the distance. They looked like they were on their way to the market or to school; they were not simply swanning about. The modesty in cut (there were a few exposed bellies, but no ankles or cleavage) and decoration, coupled with the richness in the palette, set a somber, nostalgic mood. The garments evoked another time and place, one with its own unchanging codes of dress and behavior. The friend I was with remarked that the clothing was “very old Calcutta." I’ve never visited that city, but after seeing Mitra’s clothes I have a full fantasy of it.

Image courtesy of JOY Designs.

July 18, 2014 by Nalina Moses

MAKING THE OLD BOLD

I nearly fell off my chair when a cluster of models wearing saris designed by Masaba Gupta for Satya Paul hit the runway at the Splendid India Closet show. I’ve never seen anything like them. They use large-scale contemporary graphics to highlight the garment’s classically fluid, draped form. Masaba’s most recent collection takes pop imagery including road maps, phone booths, and lipstick tubes and smears, and prints them on gauzy silk chiffon. I can only imagine the drama that erupts when a woman wearing a lipstick sari walks into a cocktail party in Mumbai. Surely she makes it clear that she is the wittiest, most modern, and elegantly appointed woman in the room.

A sari is, very simply, a six-yard length of 44"-wide fabric. It’s the way it’s draped and folded and tucked that gives it its dynamic, graceful shape. So to incorporate a sizeable graphic, rather than a small, all-over pattern, it’s necessary to plot out where every bit of fabric will land on the figure, how it will fall, and how it will move as a women walks in it. Masaba plays with ombre, incorporating long stretches of dove grey, bubble gum pink and electric yellow that accentuate, in turn, hips, legs and shoulders. She adds contrasting hot pink and cherry red borders to set off stark black and white motifs. And she sets the boldest graphics on the length that winds across the front of the torso rather than saving it for the pulloo, the end that falls freely over the shoulder and that, typically, receives the most specialized decoration. The graphics she selects are bold and loaded with pop cultural references (Warhol, Picasso, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist), but they don’t distract from the garment’s traditional silhouette. Masaba is executing centuries-old draping, masterfully, in a style that’s audaciously contemporary.

Ombre Grey Digital-Print Lipstick Saree by Masaba Gupta, 2014. Image courtesy of Satya Paul.

July 17, 2014 by Nalina Moses

DECORATIVE ARTS

I recently spent a day hiding out inside the Pierre Hotel, at the Splendid Indian Closet, a trunk show where twelve celebrated Indian-based designers showed their current collections. As I watched the presentations I was struck by the persistence of tradition. Virtually all of the clothes shown that day were traditional garment types (sari, lengha, kurta, salwar kameez), executed in traditional palettes (fuschia with red, saffron with burgundy, sea foam with navy) and with traditional embellishments (embroidery, lace, zari, beads). The one designer who succeeded in taking these conventions and elevating them to dazzling, supernatural effect was Suneet Varma.

This designer’s work has a sense of refinement that’s not always evident in Indian fashion, which can be over-embellished without being purposefully so. In many of the garments from this recent show, the ornament is so lavish that not much fabric is left bare. But each ensemble remains monochromatic, built from layers of gauzy chiffons and slithering silks in a single glowing hue (pale peach, bright lime, berry red, sky blue). And the ornament, while over-the-top, is carefully structured, repetitive, rhyming, pulling the entire garment together.

Varma worked as in intern in Paris, with a stint at Yves Saint Laurent, and there is a very French sense of exoticism (India!) and theatricality to his work. The models moved down the runway slowly, self-consciously and regally. They held enormous jewel-trimmed veils over their heads, rolled their hips like Jessica Rabbit, and took dramatic pauses in the middle of the runway. They were styled with elaborate knights-of-arabia turbans, hooker-high gold heels, and glittering, shoulder-grazing chandelier earrings. Like John Galliano’s gowns, Varma’s lenghas and saris are costume-like, magically transformative. They turn the women wearing them into courtesans and movie stars, vamps and queens.

Photograph courtesy of Suneet Varma.

July 15, 2014 by Nalina Moses

INTERIOR LIFE

While the rest of America is reading (and bickering about) The Goldfinch, I’m finishing Donna Tartt’s 1992 book The Secret History, a murder mystery set at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in Vermont. It follows a coterie of six students studying ancient Greek with a lunatic-renegade professor named Julian Morrow. Each morning they gather in his classroom for lessons in grammar and translation.

The book’s plot is well-paced, its language glorious. But what’s most enchanting is Tartt’s evocation of college life. The types of students (California girl, old money scion, prep school jock, working class transplant, rich kid drug dealer) are cataloged with devastating precision. And so are the details of campus life, circa 1992: stealing a slice of cheesecake from the communal fridge, decorating a dorm room door with a naked Barbie doll, listening to rap from a boombox on the roof, playing Hackey Sack at night on the lawn. It’s all bringing me back, not without some nostalgia, to my own college days.

In the first chapter there’s a stunning description of Morrow’s office, where the students sit sequestered from the rest of the college most of the week. Here there was “… a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant: their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky smell of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked there was something beautiful – Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels – a dazzle of fractured color… .”

That passage reminded me of Edouard Vuillard’s interiors, that convey the same sense of refined, hothouse sensuality. Like Morrow’s classroom, Vuillard’s interiors have dappled light, still air, and uninterrupted quiet. They’re stuffed full of exquisite decorations, overripe blossoms, books and papers. The students in The Secret History drink from mismatched china cups and read from tattered, cloth-bound books. The women in Vuillard’s interiors lounge with novels, cut flowers, and embroidery in their laps. In these small rooms, in contemplation and discipline, they find freedom.

L'Intimité by Edouard Vuillard, 1896. Courtesy of Petit Palais.

July 12, 2014 by Nalina Moses