Blooming heads from East Darjeeling

Elissa Waverly’s line of floral headpieces is inspired by the beauty and history of the hill station

Elissa Patel Waverly is the kind of friend who will bring you flowers when you’re having a bad day. Early last year, while heading out to get a bouquet to cheer up a friend going through a tough time, inspiration struck. “I’d been exploring the art world and felt it would be interesting to break the arrangement of bright bougainvillea, blush peonies and buttercups, and turn it into a couple of headpieces. This immediately shifted our environment from very anxious to joyful and whimsical,” she recalls.

Inspired by both her ability to create something beautiful and the feeling it roused, Waverly launched East Darjeeling, a brand of faux floral headpieces. Yes, the flowers in these photos are not real, but hand-crafted out of silk in her New York City atelier and in San Francisco, where she initially started out. “One of my all-time favourite moments in the store was when a modelling agent asked, ‘We have a photo shoot in two days. How is it going to last? Should I put it in the fridge?’ I let him know he was going to be okay,” she laughs.

Elissa Patel Waverly

Handmade charm

Growing up in Silicon Valley, with its large Indian community “that very much valued science and maths over anything creative”, Waverly wanted the kind of success that was expected there. So she tutored calculus while studying at Santa Clara University, and picked up Mandarin while learning business at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Still, she keeps the Indian connect alive through her brand name. “Darjeeling represents a place of lush green beauty, but it is also a locus of history between Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and the British regime. The idea of nature meeting conflict reminded me of the juxtaposition of the flowers and anxiousness in our inception story,” she explains.

The process, she says, “usually begins with me picking the colour palette and shape; this could be inspired by everything from old world paintings to a roadside garden. My favourite piece to date took me 10 minutes to make, but other times it can take days to get the shapes just right”. Working with artisans and milliners to produce the replication, each piece is a little different. “Some may say this is inconsistent, but we like to think of this error of ‘made by hand’ as beautiful.” In an effort to reduce waste and slow down the rapid cycle of fashion, the brand puts out new designs only twice a year.

The boho chic, Frida Kahlo vibes give way to elegance in designs like Steel Magnolias, which features white magnolias, cream peonies, standard roses in white, and white lotus. The monochromatic Story of Eve is made of green eucalyptus leaves, while Afternoon Tea is perfect for a garden party. Waverly says, “Someone recently took a piece to a black-tie soiree hosted in an open-air rail car. When I saw the photo, I felt like it was a different world, one that doesn’t exist — which fit in with my goal to transport out of the ordinary.” Not surprisingly, they also get a lot of brides and bridal parties at their store.

Cherry picked

With the very millennial mantra of celebrating positivity and happiness, East Darjeeling has partnered with Roots of Peace, an organisation that’s improving the lives of people in Afghanistan through their work with local farmers. Their aim is to plant over five million trees, creating more than 10,000 full-time jobs and facilitating exports worth over $125 million. Waverly’s work is going toward increasing the number of cherry trees grown, which directly improves the lives of farmers and their families. With each headpiece sold, the brand donates $3, enough to cover the cost of planting one tree.

From approximately ₹12,000 to ₹42,000, on eastdarjeeling.com.

Love from India

• Milliner and designer Little Shilpa has been making floral headpieces since she first started out in 1997. “It was a great way to combine my Indian heritage — where women wear flowers in their hair almost every day — to my millinery education in the UK,” she says. Similar designs made their way on to the LFW runway in 2011, inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s book of poetry, In a nod to the ennui of the text, she used prints of earlier headpieces, laminated in plastic, to depict “beauty in decay”. As we speak, she is preparing for an art residency in Paris, where she will further explore the literary classic within the scope of floral headgear.
• From using regular fake flowers when she started out, Shilpa soon moved on to handmade silk ones. Now, she is more experimental with her materials. “I use neoprene, plastic and my favourite raw material, acrylic, as well,” she says. So why are these floral crowns so popular? “For those going to music festivals like Coachella, it is an easy way to be ‘daring’ without stepping out of their comfort zone by sporting an outrageous headpiece. As for bridal parties, they lend an ethereal quality,” she explains.