Indian fashion designers foraying into home decor, be it Sabyasachi or Ritu Kumar, is not new. But now the furniture and home accessories brand Freedom Tree - known for its vibrant upholstered fabrics and furniture - has launched a womenswear line, dresses, co-ords, and tops.
Latika Khosla, founder, and design director says she decided to work on a line for women about a year ago, and onboarded Rashi Jain, who has just graduated from Gujarat’s Unitedworld Institute Of Design (UID), to lead the project. “We wanted to translate our bold signature colours and prints onto wearable breathable fabrics and feminine silhouettes. We started with a collage of colours, and tried it on for sizing and fit with our own team of young designers, mothers, and working women,” says Latika, who had launched a menswear line three years ago to test the waters.
Latika explains how the team trialled dozens of fabrics, and tweaked their silhouettes. “We spent countless hours tucking, tying, trimming, and finessing every last detail of this collection. Finally, we experimented with different colours on a range of skin tones, searching for colorways that would suit the whole gamut of Indian complexions,” she says, adding, “We have worked with soft, feathery cotton satin, viscose, and modal, all of which are bio-based, and bio-degradable. We printed in small batches, and used the hand-screen-printing process with hand-mixed colours,” she says of the collection printed and manufactured in Mumbai.
An outfit from the collection | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The colour palette, she says, “mirrors the sun as it moves across the sky through the day”. From pinks and peaches to deep blues and sunny yellows, the apparel draws from summer and the golden hour.
“We now plan on seasonal launches of new shades and styles for women’s and men’s clothing,” says Latika, whose top pick from the range is the Kagal Midi Shirt Dress. “It offers a couple of ways to style it – with pants or as a dress – rolled up sleeves or not, and it’s one of the prints closest to my heart. Kagal is inspired by the sugarcane fields of coastal Maharashtra that we saw on our road trips down to Goa. We abstracted the fields under an azure sky into this bold rippling abstract print and transformed the colourway into a warm and vibrant colour scape.”
Upwards of ₹2,800 on freedomtree.in
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