It will be wonderful when Ashish Gupta returns to showing his collections on a runway. However it has also been a wonderful privilege over the last few seasons to meet this most non-fungible of London designers in his Queens Park kitchen to go through the rail together over a nice cup of tea.
This time round the first dress he pulled, a huge skirted tulle gown embroidered with tinsel-edged doodled florals, was lighter than the hanger that held it. The next piece, a bead fringed minidress in dégradé shades of silver to bronze, was so materially substantial it required two hangers to be held. When he pulled out another—a full-sleeeved long-skirted dress covered with sequins meticulously sewn to transmit a rainbow of rough, Haring-esque zig-zags to the eye—Gupta was just as interested in how the garment sounded as how it looked. Shaking it to generate the frisky rattle of massed sequins in motion: “I love the way it sounds. With clothes we think about color and surface and form, but we never really think about sound,” he said.
Those zig-zags, flowers, and some vaguely witchy horoscopy stars and moons were all indeed doodles, purposefully sketchy, whose imperfection Gupta said was intended to showcase the meticulous perfection in the dresses’ manufacture. Fleshing out his flowers with petals of silk georgette or tufted yarn fringing turned the visible volume up to 11 while keeping the wearable weight negligible. The artisanship of his colleagues in India translated handsomely to doodle-etched denim and tracksuits that also rattled playfully while emitting undulating eyescapes of sparkle and glint. Whether to watch, to wear, or to listen to this was choice Ashish.
