Back in the mid-nineties, couture ruled the Indian fashion industry. Designer wear continued to be luxury, and with luxury came the basic premise of inaccessibility. So when Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna decided to launch their prêt-a-porter labels H20 and CUE together, scepticism came by the buckets.
Till the mid '90s, it was the time of larger-than-life clothes that came from the stables of the likes of Rohit Bal and Rohit Khosla, the big names of that time. “We thought there was a lack of prêt wear in India. And price points, everything was so expensive and exclusive. There was no designer wear available for the masses and also day-to-day wear. People used to shop abroad; they would go to London during their summer holidays. So we wanted a label that would cater to the needs of Indians, and 1997 was the right time to get into prêt,” recalls Khanna. “At H20 we were selling shirts for Rs.1,500. People were like ‘Are you crazy!! We sell a lehenga for Rs.2 lakh'.”
Gandhi adds, “We wanted non-fussy clothes, something that was easy to wear. We thought it should have great quality, great style, but it should also be affordable.”
They first started manufacturing at Gandhi's brother-in-law Atul Malhotra's factory in Chennai. “We then set up a small unit in South Extension,” recalls Gandhi. “The first store was in Golf Links, in my house, on the side.” Their present factory premises are located in a sprawling space in Noida.
They started office wear for women, because “there was a lack of trousers and jackets.”
“It was a huge, huge hit,” recalls Khanna. “Every working woman with taste who just wanted to possess clean clothing with little detailing came to us, so the brand achieved instant recognition.”
The two stores in Delhi were followed by one each in Kolkata and Bangalore. Internationally, they now retail from stores like Anthropology, Harvey Nichols and Ichetan, to name a few.
“The initial four to five years were a big struggle; some days we used to sell, some days we didn't, because it was very new for people to digest,” Khanna reminisces. It was around 2002-03 that India achieved parity with the West in terms of trends, he says. “Earlier what used to happen in the West would trickle down in India a year or two later. That has changed. We all have fashion weeks at the same time now. In an Indian spring/ summer collection and a Western spring/ summer collection, you see a similarity in the colour range and the cuts because it's an international field.”
It's been 13 years, and the designers have stubbornly stuck to their core philosophy. The cuts, in both menswear and women's wear, are modern, clean and crisp, surface embellishments largely subtle, usually metallic, and secondary to silhouette, and the prevailing Indo-Western sensibility an outside phenomenon that skipped them completely.
Considering how prêt was to become the buzzword in the country a few years after they launched, they surely had the last laugh? “All the designers who started couture started launching prêt labels looking at the success of out prêt brand, I think. But I think they're all going back to their roots and doing couture again. It's really difficult to do prêt and do volumes, so we actually stuck to it and we are actually happy doing it,” says Khanna.
Some memories from their design journey stand out. Gandhi recalls, “Ten-12 years back shows were great fun, because everybody was so involved in it.”
Khanna adds, “We have some great pictures of our early shows. In one of the first shows that we did we had John, Dino, Rahul, Inder, who are all top stars now. We remember models would ask us if we could let them keep the clothes instead of paying them.”
“We worked with Pakistani models when the Indo-Pak bus service had started. They loved the clothes and a lot of them took them back with them. And we ended up getting paid for it!” Gandhi grins.
A landmark event that established the pair as a design force and brought in global accolades came in the form of the show “Light Fantastique” in 2006-07 winter in the Capital's fashion week. “We got instant recognition internationally after that show. We sold everywhere, we went to Tranoi, we went into a lot of stores. That collection was metallic, which just goes with our metallic theme — metallics, gunmetal and colourless. We were approached by 20 to 30 international stores after that show and that was the turning point,” Khanna elaborates.
The Tranoi trade show in Paris has been a regular and important platform over the years; the duo has been taking part for six seasons now. Tranoi, Khanna says, has been a learning experience in aspects such as working in advance, handling deliveries and understanding how the international mind works. “With a new buyer you understand the culture more. Like, we're dealing with a lot of buyers from Brazil now, and people from places like Saint Tropez in the south of France, and we're getting into resort wear from India,” Khanna says. The difference in the way fashion houses work internationally — four seasons abroad as opposed to two in India — has been another learning point.
Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna also own Palette Art Gallery in the Capital. Like most things, it was a hobby that turned into work.
“I've always been a freak of art and I used to spend too much time on it. Rahul and my mom thought I needed help,” grins Gandhi. “To justify the amount of time I spent on it I said ‘Why not make it a part of work?', so we opened the gallery,” Gandhi explains. As part of a special project for the Commonwealth Games, 10 galleries, including Palette Art Gallery, will be working with Lalit Kala Akademi. “I think this is going to be one of the waterproof events that will carry on during the Games,” he smiles.
It's been a long stint for the two designers. Design-wise, how different or similar are the two? “We are two of us. I don't know how a single designer handles all of it, because we divide our work. It's so much work because being a designer in India is not just being a designer — you have to market yourself, do production, manage your factory, manage leave, you have to look at wages… you have to look at everything,” Khanna says. “So, at the end of the day, we're designing just 40 per cent of the day and 60 per cent of the day we're managing,” Khanna says. “We have similar tastes, so we are both each other's best and worst critics.”
The challenge now for their label, as in most other Indian design houses, Gandhi says, lies in stepping up production. “Retail and demand-wise, it's already established, but the supply chain has to increase. I think that's the problem with most designers now. We're all so over-geared doing fashion weeks and stores but our production systems are not so organised. We, and the fashion industry in general, need to get the production system organised because we're still at a small-scale industry,” he says.
A corporate system like that which exists in the West is a probable solution. According to Gandhi, “Here, we don't have a lot of corporate people who trust the fashion industry. Internationally you have big corporate houses that take care of the fashion industry, the entire production. The designer only designs. Over here we take care of designing, labour problems, dispatch, marketing, sales, finance… We need to start getting companies, especially for the younger generation, where they can only design.”
