When Priyanka Chopra wore a trenchcoat-gown to the Met Gala 2017 in New York last week, the Indian fashion community hopefully didn’t simply note that it was designed by Ralph Lauren. Because this...

Isn’t it time for an Indian fashion gharana

Italia postato da nedress || 6 anni fa

When Priyanka Chopra wore a trenchcoat-gown to the Met Gala 2017 in New York last week, the Indian fashion community hopefully didn’t simply note that it was designed by Ralph Lauren. Because this year’s theme of the Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, preceded by the fashion world’s biggest party, is Rei Kawakubo and her path-breaking brand Comme des Garcons.

The famously media-shy designer is part of the Japanese tsunami that swamped Paris from the 1970s onwards, changing the landscape of western fashion forever. And the 120 designs featured in this year’s exhibition (including pieces from Kawakubo’s explosive first runway collection in Paris in 1981) offer a glimpse of the modern Japanese ‘gharana’ of fashion that shocked and then awed the West.

“By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time,” the show’s curator has been quoted as saying. It was actually more of a redefinition by Kawakubo and her avante-garde contemporaries, Kenzo, Kansai Yamamoto, Hanae Mori, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake –the latter a firm favourite of India’s swish set. Back in 1985, Costumes of Royal India was the predictable theme of the Met Gala.

(Photo:formal dresses)

None of the attendees–at least the ones noted by the New York Times—wore any Indian label. Naturally not. There were none of international stature as India was still in socialistic stasis. So, ironically, we hawked our royal heritage. Now they wear Naeem Khan and Bibhu Mahapatra, but is there a distinctly Indian ‘gharana’? It has been nearly 30 years since our economy was unfettered. At least three ‘generations’ of fashion designers have been launched and endlessly feted. We have fashion weeks, a multi-campus National Institute of Fashion Technology, countless foreign-trained designers, labels and boutiques. But unlike the Japanese, there is no evidence of the evolution of a distinct Indian fashion gharana even now.

On the face of it Kenzo, Yamamoto, Mori and Kawakubo were designing western clothes, but their ‘Japaneseness’ –for want of a better word – was unmistakeable. It had nothing to do with kimonos or cherry blossoms, but a daringly different aesthetic when it came construction and shape, colour and fabric. It was both a break from its own ancient, rigid past and a continuation of its modern industrial avatar.

Japan had a head-start of sorts on India as it took to western clothes far earlier and more comprehensively than we did. The kimono is, after all, merely a costume now, not a still very widely used garb like the saree. So Japanese designers could, arguably, evolve a design perspective and develop a fashion language by the 1970s and 1980s that would capture the imagination and the lucrative markets of the west.

But the very fact that India has held onto its living heritage is a potentially exciting point of differentiation from the rest of the world that could be utilised and interpreted by designers. But that needs creative minds to be trained to look for such distinctions, to understand India’s design history and idiom, to think both eclectically as well as astutely. A modern Indian fashion gharana could begin there. Most of our fashion designers, creatively speaking, have not tapped India’s legacy beyond traditional cuts and embellishments.

Nor have enough of them broken away from it in a manner distinctive enough to make a mark as the Japanese did in their time. That is why despite huge economic progress, Indian fashion design has largely remained cyclical in nature rather than moving forward in a linear manner.

The fact that India presents a huge market domestically could be one reason why designers here do not necessarily have to think global for their creative or business plans–unlike the Japanese. Even those fashion designers who followed in Japan’s wake like the “Belgian Six” were also driven by the need to access markets beyond their own nations. But its time Indian fashion designers spread their wings.

In this context, Raghavendra Rathore’s soon-to-open fashion design school in Jaipur based on the gurukul system seems a promising initiative to meld old and new. If indeed he—and the other mavens he ropes in – can catalyse India’s next generation of creative fashion minds to think distinctive and evolutionary, the Met Gala of 2037 could showcase the evolution of the modern Indian gharana.Read more at:prom dress shops