There are many things Suneet Varma could have been. He wanted to be a sculptor; one of his teachers at London College of Fashion asked him to start teaching when he was still a student in his second term. So there he was, taking fellow students a batch junior through subjects like art, sculpture, colour theory and principles of design. If he stayed on in Europe after graduating, he says he would have gotten a job curating costumes in a museum there or at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What he did become was a fashion designer, a very respected one at that, at a time and in a place where there were few around. It's been 25 years.
The designer recently had a bash at Emporio in the Capital, where besides a fashion show, a one-day exhibition, ‘Grit & Grace', was also unveiled.
“When they came to the show people would have expected these big lace lehengas. I said, ‘I'm not going to do what people expect to see.' Of 30 pieces, only four were embroidered,” he laughs as he talks about the ramp event, when we meet him at his residence in New Delhi's New Friends Colony. “It was a simple, beautiful, bright, colourful celebration of Indian textile. It's my vision for the future. I don't want to date myself. I'm in the throes of a brilliant moment of my life. I've gained a lot, I've learnt a lot, you've been very kind, and I'm looking into the future… I don't want to be defined by the 25 years of my life.”
It's been an eventful 25 for him certainly, specially for the context to which his career's been set. With his eponymous label standing for a feminine, glamorous, fad-free aesthetic, Varma has dressed movie stars, collaborated with Judith Leiber and BMW, mentored many a new talent that's big now and, in general, seen and significantly added to the rise of an industry which was hardly that when he started out.
“When I came back, people really didn't understand what I did. I had a degree in Design and a Master's in Costume and they were like, ‘What exactly do you do? You spend all your parents' earnings becoming a tailor?' I was like, ‘Errr… no, I'm a little more than that',” he recalls.
That was when the first NIFT was being set up in the Capital, and Varma got a job there to teach illustration and helpstudents build their portfolios. “Someone like Rajesh Pratap, who's such a great success now, or Ashish Soni… they used to be 17 and I was all of 22. They'd be sitting outside my one-room office-cum-store-cum-workshop in Hauz Khas Village and I would help them learn to sketch and make their portfolios. It was a very romantic time for Indian fashion. It was new, it was interesting, it was the beginning, it was at it nascence, everybody was struggling, but everybody was learning, growing and making forays into the industry. The first store, Mutiny, was being set up in Greater Kailash in someone's basement, and Rohit Bal and I were retailing from there. A far cry from Emporio today. But those were beautiful days,” he reminisces.
One of the first Indian designers with a distinctly Western aesthetic, Varma credits that to his stint at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris after he graduated, which he calls a “huge breakthrough”. “Even though the very fact that I picked pins off the floor that touched his hand was actually my only role,” he laughs. (There, he also did the wedding dress fittings for Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.)
“I think he (YSL) was going through a lot of his Asia period at that time. I think that's where I fit in, because even though their sensibility was very European they were looking at Asia for textiles, motifs and colours for inspiration, and I think that's the input I brought in. I may have contributed in a very tiny way to what he did, but what he brought to me was tremendous — he gave me a European sensibility, he gave me something that I still cherish and which has become a part of my work now,” says the designer. A sensibility that, he says, is recurrent in all his collections, be it ‘La Belle Epoque' or ‘Swan Lake', or while recreating the Enchanted Forest from Shakespeare's ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream'. “Except one collection a couple of years ago, which was called ‘Nigahein milane ko jih chahta hai', most of it is European-based. Then I did ‘Kamasutra'. But, again, I looked at Kamasutra more as people's understanding of sex. I imagined a beautiful man and woman dancing in a rain forest under the rain, and Apu-Tanya (choreographers Aparna Bahl and Tania LeFebvre of Preferred Professionals) looked at my face and were like ‘You're going to have rain or a waterfall on the ramp!' We managed somehow.”
He's satisfied with the way the Indian fashion industry has grown. “Let's compare it to the West, or even Japan, which is one of the most thriving retail industries in the world. Let's look at what Europe's done in 150 years, starting from Charles Worth from England in 1800 to Vionnet to Schiaparelli in the 1920s and ‘30s and then Chanel in the ‘40s and ‘50s. I think India has grown tremendously in many spheres, right from retail to distribution to designers to design schools to education to now becoming one of the most important career choices, and not just design. It could be through styling, costume or graphics… I think what we've done in 25 years is far more and a lot more crammed in. Not all of it has been constructive, not all of it has been smooth sailing. It's probably been in spurts, but it's been a lot. To think that in 20 years of NIFT, from a small little space at the Indira Gandhi stadium across the Yamuna, where I first started to teach, today they have 22 NIFT centres all over the country! Whether they talk about the Indian fashion industry or the Indian consumption for luxury becoming the highest in the world by 2017, they're preparing for that. I would not say that it's always been smooth sailing, but I would say it's monumental,” opines Varma.
A firm believer in the importance of saving the past to see the future; he claims to have not lost a single photograph or a negative or press clipping in the last 25 years. “And not because I wanted to be able to do a book at any point. I think it's important to archive your work because you can, at some point, give it to an institute or school or college and I think it becomes a good reference, because not only is it my work, it's more about how the industry grew and what everybody did, where we were, who were the top models, who were the top photographers, what we were thinking, what were the textiles, what were the colours, what are the mistakes we made… not just the great things. Was it bad style, good style, did we learn from any of that?”
And that provides him another mission — setting up a good exhibit space for Indian fashion. “If it's the last thing I do in my life, that's what I will do. I had a job at the Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum in Ahmedabad and I used to literally live in the Calico Museum. And then, I became a vendor at the Met in New York; I used to develop textiles for them. I had access to all the archives at the Met. I had a vendor tag, I could wear the tag, wear my white gloves, wear my white coat like a doctor and I was allowed free in their archives at their basement. They have the best collection of costumes in the world. I looked at 13th Century Chinese hand-embroidered shoes, I looked at 17th Century Japanese fans and I looked at the best Chikankari samples in the world, which even India doesn't have today.” Food for thought there.
Ahead of the times
A one-day exhibit, ‘Grit & Grace', comprising iconic shots of Suneet Varma's designs modelled by the likes of Milind Soman, Mehr Jessia, Madhu Sapre and Shyamolie Verma and shot by photographers Bharat Sikka, Prabuddha Dasgupta and Farrokh Chothia, was unveiled at DLF Emporio in the Capital on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of his label.
Suneet Varma on ‘Grit & Grace'
“25 years is a long time. That's why I call it ‘Grit & Grace'. There are some people — a Madhu Sapre, a Milind Soman, a Mehr Jessia, a Marc Robinson, a Rahul Dev, a Shyamolie Verma, a Feroze Gujral — these are people who actually had the grit. They were going on a path nobody had been on before. They were doing the Tuff ad, they were being naked, they were being treated as subjects, they were being treated as bodies. They were being asked to brand themselves or change themselves like a chameleon. Now in a breast plate, now my Greek heroine, now my Tantric enchantress, now become my subject of revelry from La Bella Epoque, now become my Swan Lake. I think these are people who actually had the guts to break away from the mould and become iconic in their own right.
To be fair to the younger generation of models, nobody watches them as closely, nobody guides them as closely, nobody creates that imagery for that one person anymore. I had actually been to France hunting at some flea market in Paris looking for a Marie Antoinette wig for Madhur (for “Madame de Pompadour”). And I remember that wig arrived literally in the ninth moment for the photograph to be taken. Nobody would know that story. I still have that wig somewhere; it was shot in 1993. Nobody will make that effort anymore.
I still make that effort, but only as much as the collection would deserve, because that was an iconic time. That time has gone. Therefore I think nobody will become as big as them anymore. There are models now — there's Tamara Moss now, who's a rare and real beauty; there's Preeti Dhata who's done some beautiful things; Lakshmi Menon, who's doing some really interesting work; and there's Ujjwala Raut before them; there's Sheetal Mallar. I think up to that generation, of Ujjwala and Sheetal, there were still models who were creating great imagery. I think today it's become much more mass, ready-to-wear; you're in the door, you're out the door.
You have to understand, I can only project that much of my inspiration onto you. Milind and I would sit and talk about Tantric art. He was almost obsessed. So I didn't need to tell him what a Tantric master did. He knew it. So when he stood in that jungle in that mud pit wearing that shirt where his armpits were showing, he had taken on a different avatar; my job was over. Then he took that extension forward. That's why I say ‘Grit & Grace', because these people had the grit and the guts to understand what it meant to be the vision of a designer and a photographer. Therefore, one of the most important odes that I would ever create would be to them.”
