Last week, during the Lakmé Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2017, Padma Lakshmi walked the ramp after a decade in a shell-pink lehenga paired with an angrakha -style blouse. As part of showcasing designer Tarun Tahiliani’s work, her panther walk opened and closed the show. But one couldn’t lose sight of the ensemble. It was everything Tahiliani stands for: modern, relevant, and decadent yet fuss-free.
Tahiliani’s collection Chashme Sahi, which was showcased last week at the Lakmé Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2017, represented the beauty and romance of the Mughal gardens and the emperors’ love for art, architecture, poetry and literature. The collection, in Tahiliani’s own words, “is a spring of freshness and lightness; of pared-down finesse, restraint and elegant draping [with] spring flowers and delicate chikankari .” He adds, “As dressing in the day becomes more casual, the collections move more towards the evening; changes in lifestyle herald a change in fashion.”
Muse musings
His muse, Lakshmi, is someone Tahiliani admires for being outspoken and having the courage to do exactly as she pleases. “That makes her the quintessential T.T. muse,” he says, adding that Lakshmi is a Tamil Brahmin girl from Chennai who went to the United States. “Her conviction made her an international name, whether she models or does films or does her cooking show where she delights in bringing many worlds together.”
Globally, there’s been a significant shift in fashion calendars with the ‘buy now’ model gaining popularity. Lakmé Fashion Week has been showing current fashion trends for years, placing Indian aesthetics ahead of the style curve. According to the designer, ‘buy now’ is the most immediate trend and a wonderful bonus for LFW, which switched to this ahead of its time. Basically, attention spans, whether in news or marriages and even elsewhere, are much shorter. People want everything instantaneously. In addition, they are tired of buying bad copies of designer wear from stores. So this also excites customers to buy fresh, impeccable merchandise off the ateliers.
Magic carpets
The maverick designer has recently ventured into carpet designing for leading handcrafted carpet brand Obeetee. “I had the privilege of meeting Edward Oakley at Obeetee and was impressed with their passion for excellence, patience for new ideas, superb technical skills, design team and the ethical manner in which they have set up their factories. It has been a wonderful experience working with Obeetee to produce these carpets. Our design expressions have been beautifully translated without taking away from the ethos.”
The designer reveals they worked with computer scans and then added his classical references to the borders. The process included the technical team’s translation of Tahiliani’s designs into vector to make it possible to transfer thousands of shades of colours onto the carpets. It involved many colours, layering and dripping, where pieces of wool were hand-dyed and knotted. “I have been amazed throughout this whole collaboration, where Obeetee has not interfered with the design and creative processes. But [they] have lent their expertise and technical knowhow to create masterpieces. Their only brief was to make it fantastic.”
For his carpet collection, Tahiliani chose three themes. “My paintings, the chikankari and broken Mughal borders, which we were anyway working on at that time,” he says, adding that the carpets were launched in New York City recently.
A man and his thoughts
Tahiliani is one of the last of the irreverent, not-one-to-mince-words fashion powerhouses in the fraternity. And his candour and self-deprecation often strikes as a breath of fresh air in an industry that’s often dubbed superfluous. “Maybe even I got a bit carried away for a while,” he says. “But my grounded father, wife and sister laughed at it. I have always hated the pretence of privilege, and love the ability to connect and change people’s lives and the growth afforded to oneself as well.”
The designer is aware his privilege is not to be abused and that everyone ought to be treated equally. “Celebrate joie de vivre and laugh at oneself. I have been inspired by J.R.D Tata, Anna Hazare, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among. Life is a dance if you keep it real.”
Does he think fashion can be a unifying force in these turbulent times marked by misogyny and xenophobia? “Beauty and a shared ideal in the meaning of craft, and our heritage of tolerance as the largest secular democracy should have the most resonance world over for what these values mean,” he says. And he goes on to add, “If everyone forgot the manmade boundaries and the ridiculous barriers of religion, they would realise our worlds are not different.”
