South Asian women in New York dressed with a curious
similarity last summer. The young and old alike wore items more likely bought in a Mumbai bazaar than an American mall. Long cotton
bandani skirts, beaded Punjabi
juttis, and embroidered
kurtis replaced the standard
summer uniform of shorts and flip-flops. Chandelier earrings and wooden bangles
completed the India-inspired "ethnic" look.
South Asia has never been ignored by fashion; celebrities
have long flirted with Indian style on the red carpet. Notably, Gwen Stefani’s
bindis
and Madonna’s brief obsession with
saris
come to mind. Yet never before has India’s distinctive style made the leap from
high fashion to the mass market so pervasively. Teens now plan
mehndi
parties as if henna tattoos have always been a part of mainstream American
culture.
If India’s emergence as a fashion force comes as a surprise,
so do the designers and entrepreneurs at the latest ethnic trend’s forefront.
Critics often talk about fashion’s lack of diversity as an industry but a group
of Indian-Americans are nevertheless determined to make, and more importantly
keep, India fashionable in this fickle industry. Their collective mission is to
infuse India’s ancient handicraft traditions with modern taste, requiring
sleeker proportions and silhouettes. This is the essence of "fusion" design.
Ironically, prominent members of this group found their careers by accident.
New York based jewelry designer Amrita Singh left her native Delhi at the age of
sixteen to study marketing in New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. She
had no intention of designing the jewelry that now routinely graces pages of
fashion’s most influential magazines like Vogue and Elle. After graduation,
Singh worked at various venerable fashion houses, including Bergdorf Goodman and
Oscar de la Renta, but eventually left to pursue a dream of owning her business designing one-of-a-kind couture blouses.
For six months she worked in Rajasthan’s factories, celebrated for their
thriving craft traditions, to create her debut blouse collection. Merely as an
afterthought, she created jewelry from the gems left from work on her blouses so
as not to waste the precious stones. Back in America, the reaction to her
blouses was tepid but her accidental jewelry was hot, and her career was
launched.
Now, Singh travels to Rajasthan four times a year, as she
says "to get the best stones in Jaipur and to work with the best artisans who
specialize in the minakari,
or enamel setting, in Bikaner." Her jewelry initially reinterpreted
Mughal era designs. Her
philosophy is evident in her work which "takes the old and makes it new with
fresh stones and fresh cuts." Her current project, for example, reinterprets
classic jhumke designs.
"The basic jhumke design
has been the same for the last 2,000 years," she explains, "I am making them
with ebony wood inlayed with rose-cut diamonds. The caps of the earrings are
finished with different shades of light or hot pink enamel. I stay away from the
traditional colors of red, green and white. Also, I sometimes use wood in place
of usual 22-karat gold, or fresh stones rather than diamonds, in order to make
an old design look new."
According to her, an important element of modern design is to
steer clear of "heavy sets" or matching earrings and necklaces. Such heavy sets
are popular in India, but not in America where women will likely wear either a
bold necklace or earrings, but usually not both at the same time. Colored stones
like citrine and amethyst, as opposed to traditional clear stone settings, also
render her kundan pieces
modern.
Brooklyn-based clothing designer Swati Argade had a similarly
circuitous route to fashion design. Raised in North Carolina, Argade trained as
a classical South Indian dancer. She quickly became a fixture in the downtown
arts scene after her arrival in New York in 1998, but not for her clothes, at
least not at first. Performing with her sister across the city, Argade began to
make her own costumes for shows. Only when strangers repeatedly asked Argade
about the costumes did she think about fashion as a career. A diverse background
has served as the informal fashion training for Argade, who says her craft comes
naturally to her. Numerous annual summer vacations spent in India, the study of
art history, and professional dance career have all found a voice within her
designs.
Argade’s sophisticated designs, launched in the fall of 2004, are based on
her vast knowledge of Indian history. The "beauty of women" is a constant theme
for her collections, which also have imagined characters to set the mood. Her
last collection visualized what women would have worn traveling from India to
study at Oxford in 1940’s. "She was part of the intellectual movement in England
during
Indian Independence," says Argade. All regions of India
inspire her and she now spends nearly half of each year there. She often goes to
West Bengal for the "wealth of embroidery traditions and textiles" and also to
Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, as she recently did, "to get inspiration from
different craft and weaving traditions", she says.
Argade’s work also has a social dimension; she works closely
with Co-operative Associations that contribute back to the local Indian
communities that inspire and produce her designs. "Many of these craft forms are
endangered because no market for them exists anymore. For one of our past
Spring/Summer collections, we employed a weaving process not used in the past
five years and brought a particular type of silk textile design back into
production," she says and adds, "It was a special feeling, to be able to bring
back a tradition, and not just the usual
saris and
kurtas."
Intricate design philosophies of Singh and Argade inevitably
face limits in a business that places creativity on a pedestal, but has
realities of bottom-line numbers. Argade acknowledges that while communicating
history through her clothes is important, she is a businesswoman and her
customers’ desire "to look beautiful in one of her dresses" comes first.
Karima Popatia is one-half of the sister team that founded
New York City’s Indomix, one of the first boutiques in America to exclusively
sell Indian designers. She knows the pressures of retailing first hand. Several
years ago, Karima and sister Salima could not find latest fashion for Karima’s
upcoming wedding in the sari shops of New York. Frustrated, the pair went to
India where they found an abundance of gorgeous modern designs in all major
cities, which were unavailable in the USA. The sisters, with their combined
business and fashion merchandising experience, not only spotted the need for
access to such designers in the USA, but also drafted a business plan to sell
five of India’s top designers, like Payal Singhal and Kavita Bhartia, in a
proposed boutique. The chic and well-edited downtown boutique opened its doors
over a year and half ago, building early success largely by word of mouth.
Popatia’s clientele, like that of Singh’s and Argade’s, is a
mix of Americans, many of South Asian descent. Building customer loyalty is
important for a store selling creations of twelve of India’s top designers
firmly rooted in ethnic wear. The biggest challenge facing these designers and
retailers may not be getting their feet in the fashion door, but rather dealing
with fashion’s notoriously fickle spirit. India is hot right now, but each woman
must ask what happens when minimalism, the antithesis of embellished and
colorful Indian fusion fashion, returns?
Singh acknowledges the trickiness of fashion trends in the current environment,
where items become enormously popular in a short time only to fizzle quickly.
However, she believes that there will always be a market for unique, well-made
jewelry whose designs have survived hundreds of years. From a retail
perspective, Popatia says that India has actually been ahead of the American
trends, and she is confident that the items she selects for her stores will keep
pace with American fashion. "Juttis
were a big trend in India and Europe long before they became popular in America.
Now platforms are hot in America this summer but they were trendy in India last
year, so I already have them for sale in our store now."Argade sums it up best. "My designs don’t follow trends," she explains, "and
there’s not a sequin anywhere on my clothes," she says, quietly rebelling
against the shiny staple of Indian design. "My customer already has a
sophisticated personal style." Indeed, a confident customer who knows that
fusion fashion suits her style will likely keep buying, regardless of what
fashion pundits proclaim to be today’s trend. One rule in fashion might just
keep all three designers safe: What is in style one day, is out the next---and
inevitably comes back again. Ultimately, keep your bangles and
kurtis in the closet
safely because fusion fashion, even if it does go out of style, is bound to be
back.
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