When Ensemble first opened its doors at Lion Gate in Mumbai in 1987, it became the first Indian fashion store to stock multiple designers under one roof. Gayatri Tahiliani — known to the entire fashion industry as Tina — brought Rohit Khosla, her brother Tarun Tahiliani, Abu Jani & Sandeep Khosla, Neil Beiff, and Amaya together. In doing so, she pretty much set the template for all the multi-designer stores that followed across the country. Ensemble turns 30 this year. But how did a fashion store that began life as an exclusive club — a place where society ladies would shop for their daughters’ trousseaux and the occasional evening gown — evolve to become a launch pad for young design talent that doesn’t believe in spangling everything with zardozi ? Today, the Ensemble at Delhi’s Khan Market is exclusively dedicated to contemporary fashion, and the newly-opened Bandra and Lion Gate outlets in Mumbai have sections dedicated to affordable, young designers who don’t make shaadi clothes. “At least 30% of the merchandise in all our stores is contemporary Indian fashion,” says Tina.
Couture first
She admits that Ensemble did, until very recently, stock mostly glamorous, occasion-wear clothes. “We started as a place where you could buy haute couture,” says Tina. And it wasn’t until brands like Zara and H&M arrived in India that she began thinking about diversifying. What would happen to young Indian designers who can’t compete with such megabrands, Tina asked herself. “Will everyone only wear Western high-street brands on regular days and couture lehengas and embroidered saris at weddings and festivals?” It’s not difficult to imagine. After all, how many of us wear a shirt or skirt designed by an Indian fashion designer in our daily lives? The solution, she says, lay in bringing the product to the notice of the people as unique options so they could make an informed choice. Today, a customer walking into any Ensemble store can pick up a ‘designer’ garment for ₹5,000, the average price of a comparable piece at Zara. “Not only are these made by an Indian designer, but have a design and quality value that you will not find elsewhere,” she says. “I myself wear these pieces till they are almost threadbare.” And she’s not joking; I’ve seen her do it.
The thing about a store as old and established as Ensemble is that it wields not only enormous influence within the fashion industry, but also has three decades of learning to dig into. Combine that with the recent resurgence of Indian textiles in contemporary fashion and changing shopping patterns, and you have a winning formula. Besides that, brides, the single most powerful minority in Indian fashion retail, are becoming more experimental. They’re willing to invest in clothes they want rather than what their parents approve of. This, says Tina, has an overall impact on how designers design. “A young girl wants to wear something special and non-generic, and the answer lies in curating looks that she will be able to play with, not just wear once and discard.” And in stocking more modern Indian designs in the same space, Ensemble ends up educating a client about what else she can invest in, apart from their trousseau.
Got the look
To achieve this, Tina re-imagined the way people shop. “Now, we no longer sell clothes by the occasion or season, or even by the time of day. We create looks that become part of how you dress every day.” You can see it on their Instagram (@ensembleindia; 124k followers and counting), where the focus is on mixing designers and styles rather than the usual how-to-dress-like-xyz-celebrity posts that populate other accounts. In fact, you rarely see a celebrity in their feed, which is refreshing for a fashion chain headquartered in Mumbai.
That said, the who’s-who of the city will head to the Lion Gate store on December 11 to celebrate three decades of the store. To mark the occasion, Tina has asked over 40 designers to create installations that will remain on display through the month, spilling into the first week of January 2018. The store itself will become an exhibit space, filled with a light installation by Gaurav Gupta, an embroidered tent by Anamika Khanna, an architectural tree-of-life suspended in space by Amit Agarwal, a kaleidoscope that will show you the first collection Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna did for Ensemble, garments inspired by the Braille script by Wendell Rodricks, and a short fashion film by Manish Malhotra, just to name a few. It’s open to the public, and Tina says she is looking forward to having interesting conversations with her clients and visitors.
Details: ensembleindia.com
