It was only a matter of time before Sabyasachi Mukherjee ventured into jewellery. Zanyah, a collection of rings and earrings, fuses Italian design with a vintage Bengali aesthetic, and Forevermark’s careful selection of stones. The result: pieces that can’t be replicated.
It’s a little-known fact that jewellery was Mukherjee’s first choice as a designer. “Not many know that I used to design jewellery before I got into clothes. It has always been my first love. Clothes were a happy accident,” he shares, explaining that he credits his passion to his grandfather. “My maternal grandfather was a shaukeen ; a man with fine tastes and enough money to indulge it. All my childhood, I watched him buy beautiful things for my grandmother and my mother. So I grew up knowing the mechanisms of jewellery, especially vintage diamonds and gold,” he adds. Growing up in Bengal, with its strong “decorative arts movement”, as he calls it, also had a strong impact.
Serious whimsy
While Mukherjee admits that he always wanted to get into fine jewellery, he also knew exactly what he wanted to bring. “In India, everyone just does templated jewellery, which is diamond set in either white or yellow gold. The younger generation, if they want to wear diamonds, only pick solitaries — which I find very industrial — and the older generation only want to buy ‘serious’ sizes,” he rues. He saw a definite gap in the market for diamond jewellery that fell somewhere between these two sensibilities. “What we wanted to do was inject a little personality, by making them whimsical and bringing in history and the story of craft,” he states. Since Forevermark doesn’t use coloured stones, he brought in enamelling, to add some colour to the pieces and create a line that had “craftsmanship and a sense of bohemia”.
From labelling Zanyah ‘heirlooms for the urban royals’, to his Mughal inspiration, to curating for Kishandas & Co, erstwhile jewellers to the Nizam of Hyderabad, regalia seems to be a constantly recurring theme. Was this a conscious decision? “I don’t think so,” he says. “To me, it is not a theme, but rather a way of life. In my head, a royal is just someone who has an appetite for the finer things in life.”
Insta-like
Mukherjee’s penchant for social media became a strategy here, too. Zanyah was unveiled on Instagram, with moody black-and-white shots of women wearing his drop earrings and bright close-ups of men sporting his cocktail rings.
His last two collections, Palermo Afternoon and The Udaipur Collection, debuted on the photo-sharing platform too. So does this mean the traditional fashion show is on its way out?
“No! That’s like saying just because the elevator has been invented, stairs are going to be obsolete. Or that a Kindle can replace books,” he laughs. “A fashion show gives a sense of theatre and I will never give up on that. But it’s only good for the 200-odd people who attend it. We started doing our social media so that there is a direct connect between the brand’s identity, my mind and the consumer. In India, educative marketing plays a big role, especially in elevating the taste of the average consumer.” With over 1.2 million followers on Instagram, and with each picture garnering a minimum of 4,000 likes, he does have a point.
Collective creation
Collaborations are nothing new to brand Sabyasachi. From Pottery Barn and Asian Paints to Christian Louboutin, he has tried his aesthetic on varied media and they have all worked magic.
How does he pick his collaborators? “It’s simple: I only work with people at the top of their game. But I also have two thumb rules — the collaborations have to tell a crafts story, and an India story.” But with each collaboration, there is a personal inclination as well. “I have a fetish for wallpapers; all bourgeois Bengali homes have wallpapers. So when Asian Paints came to me, I wanted to work with them because they are the market leaders in that category. I got the same sense, and a lot of freedom, with Pottery Barn, Forevermark and Christian Louboutin, who is now a dear friend,” he sums up.
However, he is clear that a collaboration isn’t just about money, but about collectively creating wealth for both brands.“Together, we have to be able to make some change to the consumer industry that we see around us,” he concludes.
Prices start at approximately ₹3 lakh for The Zanyah Collection
