He’s been in the business for more than 20 years and employs around 50 craftspeople in his homeland to realize his intricately impactful womenswear. And yet until this season Ashish Gupta, who has long been himself based in London, had never before shot a collection back in India. The reason for this change might have been deeply unfortunate (a close relative suddenly fell very ill while Ashish was visiting), but the results are inspired.
After identifying a handily talented locally based photographer, Ashish Shah, the designer repaired with his crew and collection to the faded colonial grandeur of a hunting lodge around three hour’s drive from Delhi. This milieu freed Ashish to channel many of the 100% Indian subtexts in his subconscious that might normally be diluted by an English setting. As we chatted at the kitchen table of his place in London (to where he has now returned, relative partially recovered) he identified as inspirations the 1980s Masala films and contemporaneous Indian movie magazines, Indian-made jujubes, monsoons, the velour bedspreads favored by his family in the 1970s, the tulip-field scene in Silsila, and the 2000-ish BC dancing girl sculpture excavated from Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley.
Almost accidentally then, this collection was a second-season evolution of fall 2022’s look at the adaptation of Euro-centric modes of dress in India: a post-colonial, post-globalization, and for sure post-modern scattering of sequins in search of fresh patterns. Madras check, geeky knit tank tops, flannel shirting, and hand-drawn florals were all elevated to siren status through their transformation into sequin—Ashish was stretching the conventions of fabrication way before Bottega. From India to England and now back again, the latest chapter in the Ashish story held a twist that expanded its entire narrative—and contained clothing that looked transportingly wearable, wherever you wished to go. Ashish’s unplanned presence in India proved a sequin-writ exception to Salman Rushdie’s edict in Midnight’s Children: “most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
