Lost languages are waiting to be heard. Designer Sonam Dubal's Autumn/ Winter 2011 line, ‘Hidden Voices, Ancient Sounds', which shows at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week tomorrow, takes off from the premise of old scripts and seldom heard musical instruments. More specifically, as Dubal explains, old Central Asian instruments and Brahmi, Pali and Dravidian scripts.
Coming from Dubal, things are tempered. “They're basically symbolic; the language is not alphabets. It's very primal. I've juxtaposed them into embroidery with coins,” he says.
The musical instruments come hand-painted and block-printed. “The work is a beautiful understanding of voices that you can't hear. Of instruments… how they symbolically reflect sound. That's the way we've used them,” Dubal explains.
While the theme is demanding in terms of research, the challenge he says was to do in a way that's not over-appealing. A print fest was the last thing on his mind. “It has to be very controlled. The embroideries have it (the scripts) but it's very gentle. It's not juxtaposed into huge prints or anything like that. It was more to create awareness about languages slowly disappearing. Also, the fact of the matter is that most of our culture is slowly disappearing without us realising it.”
Dubal worked under Rohit Khosla immediately after graduating from NIFT, Delhi. For eight years after that, he took a hiatus from the fashion scene, at least actively. “It was a break in the sense I spent a lot of time re-understanding design,” he explains. “So I worked for a bit with the National School of Drama, did a project with them and also travelled a lot. And various advertising campaigns... did a lot of things. It was basically to evolve a sort of a language that I could speak in terms of design before I launched my own label.” And launch he did — in 1999 he set up Sanskar.
Besides the use of traditional eastern silhouettes like the bankhu and honju, recycling also emerged as a recurring theme over the years — he is known to incorporate old saris into his garments. “It still is,” Dubal says. In the present collection, it comes in the form of a Poiret cape, which uses leftover threads from all the other fabrics used in the line. While velvet is the dominant fabric, there's also silk, heavy cotton and eri silk. Colours are very controlled — brown, maroon, gold, and burgundy. The palette is very controlled. “Very evening, very winter.”
While silhouettes this time range from wraps, kaftans, dresses and asymmetrical capes to formal pants, one item of clothing that is hardly absent from Dubal's collections is the jacket. This time too there's no aberration — there are formal dinner jackets, dervish jackets and long cut-worked coats.
“Jackets have always been an important part. Through the years the jackets have done really well and now they're literally the main silhouette that sells both internationally and in the domestic market,” he says. “Truthfully, you know, the jacket is very simple. My jacket is very in-tune with the denim jacket, except that it's embroidered. It can be worn very casually as well as formally. As a result of which it's something that's quite universal in wearing. So it's becoming more an accessory rather than just a jacket itself,” Dubal adds.
