Amit Aggarwal is one designer known to stand out in the crowd when it comes to his unique vision and presentation. The designer chose to turn an auditorium inside the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi into as fashion runway for his show at the FDCI India Couture Week 2022. The audience were seated on the stage as models walked through the seats in the auditorium in dazzling creations by Amit Aggarwal.
The collection called Pedesis is a refreshing bookend to the label’s part-miraculous, part-fantastical journey of a decade. But a constant thread of morphing forms and blurring the inescapable folds of time runs through it all. “It is also a kaleidoscope ode to the fact that we are at an interesting bend in time where the digital space accommodates those whimsical aspects to ourselves not accessible in the physical world. Every silhouette shows that we carry the echo of the first human and hold the inception of the future – overlaid on the fine-grained realities of the present. This collection is a celebration of the fact that we are the glitch in time: warping forms, straddling realms, embracing eternity,” the collection note read.
Describing the collection after the show, the designer said, “There is a lot of interjection of cultures from the past and future, so there were influences of tribal jewellery, etc. I wanted to amalgamate that with thoughts of what the future could be for mankind, which could be a cyborg. I think Pedesis is the crux between the time and place that we are at.”
“The interesting part about the collection is the polymer that is now taken to handloom. We drew inference from the ikkat and made the polymer into a yarn, and woven it into handloom. The cross-pollination between something as traditional as the handloom and the polymer makes this beautiful tech-tile textile which I absolutely love,” Aggarwal said.
From plus-size models to members of the LGBTQi community were among the models walking the ramp, though the designer said it wasn’t a conscious effort to appear ‘inclusive’. “The buzz word inclusivity is a little overused, honestly. For me the shape of a body or your choices and preferences do not define you. Since my collection represents the human race at large, it was important to go all out and include different kinds of people and ideologies,” he said.
When asked why did he not follow the trend of having a celeb showstopper like many other couturiers, he said, “We celebrate our 10 years this year, and it was important for me to put the Amit Aggarwal tribe out. Presenting a variety of different colours, shape was more important at this juncture than getting someone to idolize the collection.”
