Some 14 years ago, when I moved to Mumbai from Hong Kong, it felt like I’d fallen into a shopper’s Wasteland. Just a few years before that, in 2000, Crossroads, Mumbai’s first real shopping centre, required its customers to prove their worthiness by presenting a credit card or a mobile phone at the entrance. Mobile telephony was so expensive back then you had to pay to receive calls, which may explain that odd Litmus test. Ensemble, the multi-outlet designer fashion store, had an outlet in Crossroads, and so did Mango, among the first high-street brands to enter the Indian market. But most shopping took place at underground centres like Heera Panna or in bright-shiny tube-lit department stores like Amarsons and Premsons. One could get most things you wanted, as long as you weren’t shopping for ambience.
Then one day, I walked into Bungalow 8 — a vast Wonderland of edited objects I couldn’t find anywhere else and I didn’t know I needed. It was located under the bleachers of Wankhede Stadium in South Mumbai. Run by Maithili Ahluwalia, that early avatar of B8 was designed by architect Bijoy Jain and styled by the India-born Belgian designer and hotelier, Lou Lou Van Damme. In 2007, Wallpaper magazine would name it one of the best stores in the world to visit. Ahluwalia, like her mother Jamini and grandmother Chandu Morarji before her, is an influential design entrepreneur. She is an aesthetically resolute individual who’s been running what is a one-of-its kind space, displaying products that reflect what she calls “artisanal modernity”. “For stores to survive they must have a point of view,” she says. “We are very intentionally small scale, so there’s a fastidiousness and cantankerousness about us that is very important to our identity.”
Like Ahluwalia, Ensemble’s Tina Tahiliani-Parikh, Good Earth’s Anita Lal, Amethyst’s (Chennai) Kiran Rao and the erstwhile Once Upon a Time’s Bina Ramani, the Indian retail landscape has always had a few individualistic patrons in a business that is filled with challenges. When boutiques like Ensemble first opened, between the late 1980s and early 2000s, the market, both for fashion and interiors, was difficult because there were so few takers for high-end products. (Interior products are still harder to sell than fashion.) As the market grew, with higher spending capacity, accessibility and quality consciousness, so did rents, and now e-commerce is straining whatever potential that exists. And yet, despite the logical reasons for failure, there’s been an optimistic surge in high-end retail outlets across the country, particularly in its most expensive and developed markets, Mumbai and Delhi.
Retail 2.0
Brick-and-mortar stores are so very important in the way they reflect the prevailing Zeitgeist through design, visual merchandising and presentation. The Hermes windows in India right now are a whimsical display inspired by the work of American cartoonist and inventor, Rube Goldberg. The products aren’t as important as the stunning display of French humour and Indian craftsmanship. At Le Mill in Mumbai, high-end fashion, heirloom jewellery and the hallmarks of colonial-era architecture meld seamlessly in the 4,000 sq ft space, and it allows the viewer to experience the possibilities that exist when unusual influences are married together. Most of us don’t have access to finely-tuned homes and great interior design, and retail outlets are a fantastic medium, if you pay attention to the detailing as much as the products on the shelves. It is where architects are doing some of their most interesting work.
Mumbai-based architect Rooshad Shroff, who has worked with both Hermes and Louboutin, is right now re-imagining the familiar spirit of Good Earth for their newest outpost in Jodhpur. It will be part of the experimental JDH Urban Regeneration Project that will revitalise the walled city through a contemporary alliance of design, hospitality, retail, culture and sports. Imagine a heritage precinct with 21st century mod cons, tourist attractions and shopping facilities.
The store is built around an amphitheatre facing the newly-restored stepwells, at the heart of this area. “It is not a space meant for high footfalls, so the storytelling and experience is really important,” says Shroff, who also designed Jaipur Modern. For Good Earth JDH, he has tasked artisans to paint the ceilings in the pichchwai style, while the interiors will echo both his signature sleek aesthetic and classic Good Earth motifs and drama. A chic retail outlet just 30 seconds away from ancient stepwells is the kind of design setting only possible in India.
India at heart
In December this year, Ensemble will turn 30. The country’s first couture designer store marked its 29th birthday by unveiling Ensemble Great Western, the flagship store re-imagined as an avant-garde Goliath by architect Bijoy Jain. This new avatar has material references that are both luxurious and rustic — amenities like an exposed elevator stand, clothes that hang off of bamboo rods, highly-embellished accessories that sit on unpolished wooden shelves, stripped floors, and paint (on some of the walls) that has been administered with the ancient painting technique of araash . Jain’s association with the brand comes from his long-standing friendship with the Tahilianis, and so Ensemble is the only retail brand that the nominee for the 2017 Pritzker Prize has finished recently. If you’re interested in Indian design, this is enough of a reason to visit the store.
Much of new retail is fronted by the latest generation of successful fashion designers, like Masaba Gupta who’s just opened stores in Mumbai and Delhi; Anavila Sindhu Misra with her now one-year-old standalone in Mumbai, and Rahul Misra’s own in Delhi. Perhaps the most anticipated opening of the year was Raw Mango’s first Mumbai store, some nine months after Sanjay Garg started his search for a designer that could transfer the Gandhian chic aesthetic of his label into spatial design.
When Garg first told me the spot he intended for the store was the one Bombay Electric had occupied for many years, I wondered if the economics would be worth the investment. Costs in that part of South Mumbai range between ₹300 to ₹400 per square foot. Garg’s austere designs occupy a niche within a niche. Even its brightest colours are contained by a minimalistic Indian design credo. Though, very impractically, RW doesn’t sell online. “For Raw Mango products, online presentation is too flat. Taking a square picture and putting it on a site is not my idea of luxury,” he says. It was far more important for him to be able to control the space and presentation of his pieces. Garg lined up a powerhouse of a design team that included designer-to-the-stars Ashiesh Shah and merchandising genius Lou Lou Van Damme. The team created a gentle, minimalist space where warmth and sunlight are abundant, and every detail recalls a pared-down practical spirit.
Case for curation
On the other hand, textile designer Anavila Sindhu Misra had just under a month to complete her new shop, and she did it mostly on her own. Misra, who is best recognised for her linen saris, is celebrating the first birthday of her eponymous Mumbai space, which opened same time last year. She was looking for a bigger studio when chance led her to a spot with the potential to double-time as both studio and retail outlet. She calls her decision “impulsive, but it’s so nice to be able to present my designs in the environment I imagined it,” she says, adding, “When you have a store, you understand a whole new set of needs, like what it takes to move collections, and the importance of having a seasonal line. You understand what clients are looking for and how often they are interested in buying something.”
Internationally, there’s a deluge of news reports citing anecdotes about brick-and-mortar store closures and the ever-widening base of e-commerce consumers. Bloomberg recently published a piece headlined with the declaration: Instagram Killed the Retail Store. In June, Colette, the 20-year-old trendsetting Parisian outlet, announced it was closing down, inducing collective ululation from around the fashion world. If stores now edit and curate rather than select or stock, it is because of places like Colette, and Milan’s 10 Corso Como. These kinds of stores aren’t places you go to buy; you go there to understand how you should see design, how to read trends.
Reading the tea leaves, cynics will say a store needs at least a year or two to see whether they can make the economics work. The curatorial role once played by a retail outlet has been reduced because you can find anything online. All you need is a smartphone. Late last year, another great retail champion of individuality, Bombay Electric, shut. But the longevity of a particular store doesn’t matter as long as one is replaced by another of equal strength. For me, a tour of the retail spaces in a city is like being the pilgrim of a smorgasbord of faiths. Bodice and Anomaly for minimalism, Sabyasachi for the exquisitely-detailed vintage interiors, Ensemble for flourish and its selection of designs, Ogaan’s capsule collection at Khan Market, Obataimu in Mumbai for custom design, and Amethyst in Chennai for its simple yet romantic outlook. The Indian retail space is not a Wasteland anymore, that’s for sure.
Manju Sara Rajan is the former editor of Architectural Digest India.
