日別アーカイブ: 2017年3月30日

An elegy to beauty

 

(Photo:evening dresses)The appliqué flowers almost drop off the ecru-hued bodice at the Evoluzione store in Chennai. Light shines though a sheer jacket embroidered with an ikat design, across exquisite sarees in pastels, over a dove-grey dress with deep pink lotuses on its skirt.

Beauty — its fragility, its omniscience, its pervasiveness despite everything — is what The Valley of Missing Flowers is about. The Spring-Summer 2017 collection of Kolkata-based label Dev R Nil was inspired by an installation the designer duo saw at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale this year, photographer Bharat Sikka’s photo series on Kashmir, titled Where the Flowers Still Grow .

“It really stayed with us,” remembers Navonil Das aka Nil, “The collection is reminiscent of what we saw.” The sombreness of the theme seeped into the way it was showcased at the recent Summer/Resort 2017 edition of LFW, he admits. “We presented the collection against tombstones made of plywood,” says Nil. Additionally, in keeping with the theme, the colour palette was sober — soft peaches, powder blue, grey with an occasional red or deep indigo, “signs of some hope,” smiles Nil. As with all the 25-30-odd collections they have worked on in the last 13 years since the label’s inception in 2004, this one is, “steeped in Indian culture, but the way modern India wants to wear it,” explains Nil. Think of it as a reinterpretation of the traditional — Bengal jamdani created out of appliqué work, ikat feathers that have been embroidered on, metallic, zippered jackets worn under sarees — such that, “we create an affinity for the original too,” says Nil.

An exploration of themselves

That they are Kolkata-based helps dictate their design sensibility, because, “The pace of life is slow there, there is enough room for exploration,” say Nil, a graduate of the Canberra Institute of Technology in Australia. He met his partner, Dev, when he got back, he recalls. “It was through a mutual friend. We got along like a house of fire; within four months of meeting, we launched our label,” he says.

They started with four tailors in their uncle’s garage. Today, they have around 100 employees working for them, says Nil, adding that they have been part of the South Indian fashion landscape almost since the beginning. Talking about it, “I woke up in the morning and opened the paper to notice that Air Deccan had launched really cheap flights, all connected to South India. So I booked tickets on them, one from Kolkata to Chennai and one from Chennai to Bengaluru,” he grins.

Ask him what is Dev R Nil’s USP and he laughs, “We look at fashion as an exploration of ourselves, so we never get clamped down by the signature style,” he says, adding that they are constantly looking at different aspects of fashion. It shows in the prints and the themes, the colour palette and the fabric they use, even what they choose to design. “We are even working on curtains. Imagine our jamdani as curtains, beautiful sheer curtains,” he says.Read more at:formal dresses

カテゴリー: fashion | 投稿者tedress 17:24 | コメントをどうぞ