ODE

This collection is an ode to the absence of colour, of reimagining a world with flashes of colour in memory. It is an attempt to look beyond the rainbow and to gaze deep into the black hole. And most of all, it is an homage to absence, which endures despite love and other fleeting happiness. This collection collapses everything we have created so in trying to achieve a signature. The fabrics are not our usual ones, the embroidery is not what we have been doing, the silhouettes are elaborate in a way that we have experimented with what we can do with what is out there…

 

The collection is a departure from the quintessential “us”. The stones that we have used are reminders of “royalty” and were used as signifiers of status in the society. There is the force of randomness in the collection where we have tried to dismantle our own style. The front becomes the space where there is least visibility. The covetedness of the place is challenged with the set design. Similarly, we have used opulent crafts to showcase a collection in black with “empathy” as our guiding principle trying to imagine a world of black and white and grey and the richness of it, the sharpness of the contrasts and relying on only these and the story of the colour-blind painter interspersed with the narrative of a life in an Indian village where darkness is equally omnipresent as the daylight, we are hoping to bring a disruption recognizing it as a vital force for relevance, experimentation and a narrative tool for challenging status quo. It begins at home and for us, the colour palettes have always been predominantly white. And it is now time to harness the black subjectivity of our lives and times and dismantle the “negative” connotation of black as “inauspicious” in certain cultures and telling a human story of hope and resilience through the collection.

 

“Colour blindness is not brain damage or a limiting condition. It is a lens of resilience from which we courageously leave the comfort of colour to enter into a leaden world defined only by tonalities and sharpness. This challenge is courage and with this, we take it as a condition of life for the very brave who can bear the monotony of black and white and see in its contrast, the world in its full measure.