Celebrating a decade at FDCI India Couture Week 2022, the designer introduces a new textile and flirts with the idea of his dresses becoming wall art and sculptures
Celebrating a decade at FDCI India Couture Week 2022, the designer introduces a new textile and flirts with the idea of his dresses becoming wall art and sculptures
Crafted from recycled plastics and industrial materials, Amit Aggarwal’s floor-skimming dresses and lehengas at FDCI’s India Couture Week aren’t too far removed from sculptures. That, he admits post show, was the plan all along. His 66-piece collection, Pedesis, was seeded in pre-pandemic Bali, the lush Isle of Gods known for its basketry, batik and handcrafted jewellery. The Delhi-based designer had brought back two large portraits from that holiday, his “first point of stimuli”. “They are of this African tribal boy. Perhaps because I looked at them every day for the last two years I was subconsciously drawn towards the influence of tribal culture, which came through in this collection, with the colour, body adornments, and the ambiguity of form,” he says.
An outfit from the collection
‘Something new with a story’
Aggarwal, 42, spent the early months of the pandemic sketching, tracking parrots from his window and finding comfort in everyday chores like washing the dishes. He was “looking inwards” he’d told me back then, and also trying to understand “how excess fabrics could go into creating something new and fresh, an interesting story for clients”. Well, he appears to have succeeded. This new collection marking a decade of his eponymous couture label has the sculpted structures and techniques like rubber cording and tube pleating that we have come to expect of him. But it also debuts a brave new textile. “Technically, we have always woven polymer by hand, not on the handloom,” says the designer, referring to the excess strips of polymer, a leftover from the moulding process. “We now converted that ‘yarn’ into a weft, while the loom was laid with organic cotton for the warp. And this became a handwoven textile,” he explains. “Really beautiful, it looked like a superb, modern ikat.”
Amit Aggarwal with a karigar
A glitch in time
At his Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium show last week, where the drab interiors of the auditorium were intentionally retained, Aggarwal’s models showcased tiered and fantastically cut dresses, prismatic flowing skirts, fun jumpsuits and sharp, geometric menswear in this fabric. And they teased at his pet themes of beauty over function, of timelessness and a glitch in time. Later, expanding on his glitch in time theory, he says, “We all know that time is the biggest narrator of our story and connects you, makes moments happen. If time glitched, multiple verses would meet, and you could exist in multiple parallel universes at the same time.” His ‘visual narration of time’ borrows its name from physics because Pedesis (or Brownian motion, the random movement of particles in a fluid following collisions with other atoms or molecules) also represents his 10-year journey, the designer says.
Tiger burning bright
“Amit is creative as a designer but is as beautiful as a person. You see that in his clothes. He gets a woman’s form beautifully. The waist is always nipped in, the bust is always highlighted. I like that about his style. I enjoyed the extravagance of the intricately created clothes that were larger than life. But this look (picture) summarised everything for me: Amit’s aesthetic, the craft, the innovative techniques used and yet it is extremely wearable. It’s almost like a tiger on the prowl but in Amit Aggarwal’s style,” says celebrity stylist Anaita Shroff Adajania.
Among his models’ adornments were armors and halos, reminiscent of gods or goddesses. “That wasn’t the direct point of connection but it was subconscious I suppose,” Aggarwal admits. “As a child, one of my first creative moments was Ganpati puja at home, when I made the small thermocol temples myself. What I enjoyed thoroughly was fixing the motor-powered chakra behind the deity! That said, I feel the halo also speaks about the energy you exude. The aura you carry of yourself.”
No corporate plans
Originally from Mumbai’s Goregaon suburb, Aggarwal is one of few who pushed the envelope at the 15th edition of ICW 2022, an event that saw 13 designers showcase in the capital over nine days.
“My favourite look, almost like a tiger on the prowl but in Amit’s style”: Anaita Shroff
He talks about creating pieces that can be archived even while changing the language of polymer and confesses that he currently has no plans that involve corporate investment. “For me, the journey is young. I need to understand how polymer will react. The first piece we made is in the archive and hasn’t aged. The shape holds itself, it is still foldable and washable,” he says, when I ask about the “higher purpose” of his garments. “Something you own doesn’t, in the traditional gamut of fashion, always need to be about covering your body or adornment. That could be the initial purpose. A lot of my pieces, if you see them without the body form, would become beautiful sculptures for their living spaces.” Last Saturday, as he took a bow on stage, the only colour to his black ensemble being his red Cardi B x Reebok sneakers, Aggarwal once again proved that for him, the story has just begun.
