Last year, Rina Singh took a trip to Kashmir to explore the possibility of a collection. She found her inspiration through a family and their home in Aru village. Rina talks of the wooden house, with “green walls, a mustard carpet, burgundy pillars” that gave her current collection its jewel colours, used in uncommon ways: earthy teal with vintage rose, silver grey with a vegetable indigo, washed-down burgandy with forest green, for instance. “They hold the eye,” she says.
Fabrics are in blends of wool-cotton, wool-linen, and silk-linen with textured wool (made on a twill weave and treated thereafter). Kashmir was the backdrop, and she’s not shifting her work to include heritage. It’s still her contemporary-wear easy-fit style, with the structure and colour making them winter-wardrobe worthy. “They’re darker, structured, leaner, but not masculine; they lean towards the feminine nostalgic,” she says, adding that spring-summer is relatively easier to plan for because it’s all about light-weight fabrics. Winter starts with the festive season, gradually slips into cool, and then cold weather.
There’s little embroidery, only seen in tiny details on buttons, or as a single paisley on a kurta. The spirit of the collection was inspired by the three sisters in the home in the mountains, who were very religious on the one hand, but also enjoyed Bollywood songs on their phones, on the other. The promotional material was shot with three models, with Rina’s imagination of how they’d behave if they shed their inhibitions.
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The collection has overlays, dresses, pants, divided culottes. “There’s a lot of layering, both underlayering and overlayering. You’ll find a three-piece story, with a trouser, jacket, and long dress, or just trousers with a kurta, which can be bought as separates or together,” she says.
In fact, it’s the kurta, sans slits and the ‘traditional’ elements that has made it to Japanese brand’s Uniqlo launch in India. The lifewear concept marries Rina’s lived-in wear to create designs that are “accessible, casual, timeless. I come from a sentiment of Indian techniques. They come from technology. The emphasis is on clean, functional, minimal.” Uniqlo stores across Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines will stock her version of the kurta.
Of her learning from the collaboration, she says it’s a matter of work culture: “As Indians we are so used to doing things quickly, and to things going wrong. I can be working and the electricity can go off, so I need to have the ability to think on my feet. They do it thoroughly and precisely.”
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Sunalini Mathew