By her own admission, Namrata Joshipura is a stickler for romantic novels. Which is why when the designer read a short romance story in a magazine, she was completely taken up by it. “In the climactic line of the story, the hero tells his beloved, ‘I love you but I have chosen darkness’. It sounded so intense that I decided to base my collection on it,” she recalls. So, for the upcoming Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) that will kick off in the Capital on March 21, Joshipura has called her collection “The Dark Hour”. Besides the story, architect Frank Gehry’s constructs have also been an inspiration for her.Models on the runway with a dazed expression, eating bread, sindoor smeared on their foreheads and lipstick smudged across their lips — when Kolkata designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee launched his maiden collection at what was then the Lakme India Fashion Week, rooting the collection in the red-light area of Kolkata, it earned him as much flak as praise. While purists trashed him as gimmicky and melodramatic, Mukherjee stuck to his guns. “We shouldn’t look to the West for designs, let Indian themes set the tone,” he argued. What began with Mukherjee has now become the norm: presentation and themes have gained as much importance as the collection itself.Clark Gable and films by Carole Lombard may have served as inspiration for Roberto Cavalli’s 2007 fall collection, but our desi designers are not far behind when it comes to inspirations that range from the mundane to the bizarre. Where once “Mughal-inspired” was as far as designers once stretched their imagination, of late, with so many designers at so many fashion weeks, more eyeballs are needed. Designers seek inspiration in all places — from the Kumbh Mela to tea cloth, from former models to films – to find a leitmotif for their collections.For his collection last year, designer Rajesh Pratap Singh was inspired by Satyajit Ray’s movie Jalsaghar (The Music Room) “There’s something very touching about that movie—all that decadence and lost glory makes me feel sad,” the reticent designer elaborated. This year, though, Singh’s inspiration is less cerebral. He will display a collection inspired by “deeper love”. “Love has different meanings for different people. It can be emotional, spiritual or physical. I am trying to essay my notion of higher love,” he says.Or Take Rohit Bal. His collection for WIFW is called “Koyla”, and no, it has got nothing to do with the Rakesh Roshan movie. Bal says he has sown his wild oats but now he wants to rediscover himself. “I have done a lot of wild things, so I wanted to do something different,” he says, explaining his sudden switch to sooty charcoal from his customary pastel palette. The change to a more sober look, says Bal, is a reflection of his mood. “I’m going through a calm phase and it is night for me now,” he says.Ranna Gill has a simplistic interpretation of her theme, called “Skin”. Says Gill: “I was inspired by animals shedding their skin. Since my collection deals with animal prints, I thought the name was apt.” If that is simple, then Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna’s collection “Light Fantastique”, inspired by Twiggy, the hugely popular British model in the 1960s, known for her X-ray-thin figure, has a quirky maverick touch to it. Puja Arya’s collection has a very Alice in Wonderland feel to it. The clothes resemble loose tea towels and the patterns resemble floral motifs on tea cloth. After his fall collection, designer Mark Jacobs said, “I always think it’s silly to talk about themes and inspirations. The collection is just always about this youthful, angelic, idyllic army.” But he had something else doing the talking for him. Jacobs flew in his friends Sofia Coppola, Zoe Cassavetes, Selma Blair, Rufus Wainwright, Lisa Marie and Lucie de la Falaise for the show to symbolise this idyllic army. Now that’s what we call inspired! And where this army is not be found, other inspirations may step in.
