Tag: Sabyasachi

Sabyasachi 25 Years In The Industry: When Sabyasachi Mukherjee debuted his first collection, Kashgaar Bazaar, at Lakmé Fashion Week in 2002, the show was barely preceded by the bated breaths and collective high hopes that now surround the designer. His models walked the catwalk wearing materials that paid tribute to India’s rich and diverse craft heritage, with a nod to the intellectual and poetic face of his home city of Calcutta through models accessorised with stacks of books and horn-rimmed glasses. The collection was seamlessly and irretrievably both Indian and Western and served to solidify Mukherjee as a designer to behold on both Indian and international fronts. Sabyasachi: 25 Years in the Industry A quarter century since that initial show, Sabyasachi’s brand has reached the height of fashion glory, as testified by a roll call of awards and accolades such as being the first Indian brand to collaborate with fashion giant H&M and also with high-hitting global brands such as Estée Lauder and Christian Louboutin, and breaking new ground in becoming one of the first Indian designers to show at Milan Fashion Week, and opening the door last month to his first American flagship store in Manhattan’s Soho. It would not be an overstatement to say that the designer has emerged as a de facto fashion ambassador for India on the world’s centre stage, or that he carries this symbolic mantle with a gusto and sense of pioneerism. It is contrary to the present starry heights of the designer to understand that his beginnings were modest and deeply entrenched in the cultural texture of his hometown. Calcutta is an artistic and emotional fulcrum for the designer and has been a great muse for the designer to the extent that it is a unifying thread that runs through his enormous body of work. It is not sentimentalism and nostalgia that keep Mukherjee connected to Calcutta, but the tension within the city’s many contradictions. From its presently declining luxury to its still-thriving flower market and its plainly greasy underbelly, there are respectable elements in the designer, who affirms the city’s rich and dense intellectual tradition as his inspiration. Calcutta, a city with patina, where the tallest buildings slump to the ground to the grim reality of decline, where the tales of the rowdy red-light district of Sonagachi, the muscular pimps of Kamathipura, and the fizz of marigolds of Mallick Ghat all exist together under the mesmerised and ever-watchful gaze of Goddess Kali, is my very inspiration,” asserts Mukherjee. It is in this arena of contrasts—where opulence confronts the rough-and-tumble of everyday existence—that Sabyasachi has built an empire of Indian handiwork. There can be no greater testament to Mukherjee’s respect for his roots than that, even now that he is a global player, the designer chose to stage his landmark 25th anniversary show on Republic Day eve in Mumbai through Old Calcutta.The show witnessed the venue itself becoming Mukherjee’s hometown, and with each and every aspect of the set followed with painstaking detail. All the looks, which were 150 of them, were created in West Bengal, walked a fine line between minimalist restraint and maximalist abandon, as we have come to expect from the designer, and boasted intricate embroidery that mimicked tweed, velvet appliques over faux fur, and ethereal Japanese cotton with woven Pashmina.“A lot of what you see on the runway isn’t fabric; it’s pure embroidery,” Mukherjee says, acing the sleight of hand and illusionism mastery that have come to define his work and drawn a treasure trove of A-list fans, including Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, Ananya Panday, and Alia Bhatt, all of whom attended this milestone collection, while long-time muse Deepika Padukone opened the show. Aside from his artistic inspirations, the desire to create India’s first true globally-convergent fashion brand has been the breeze in Mukherjee’s sails over the past several years. Although the designer’s glamorous Milan Fashion Week debut was in 2004 and his subsequent transition to New York Fashion Week was in 2006, it has been a couple of years since he has organised a fashion show, instead unveiling his collections on social media, with rave responses. It was a canny move amidst global popularity and demonstrated that Mukherjee, despite years of experience already under his belt, still has his finger firmly on the pulse. It’s such capacity to make strategically astute decisions that is as much responsible for the designer’s success as his creative brilliance.Take the designer’s maiden bridal collection, Chand Bibi, which debuted in 2007—it became an instant favourite on wedding mood boards and changed the vocabulary when it came to Indian bridal haute couture, which is perhaps why its impact is still being felt today, nearly two decades later. In the coming 25 years, I will hone my craft with subtleties in precise finishing for intimate sharing by the owners of those they embellish—diamond decorations at the back of necklaces, beautiful silk-lined quiltings in hand and intricate embroideries replicating intricate textiles,” says Mukherjee in describing what the future holds for him. As his work is a continuous dialogue between reinvention and nostalgia and is placed within heritage but also within the contemporary vernacular, it’s a safe wager that we’ll see more of the same, and some we have never seen previously, from the designer. If Mukherjee has ever been very good at one thing, it’s still keeping us guessing, 25 years on.