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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The material shift
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The material shift

From the ramp to a design exhibition or the Cannes red carpet, how a material changes character and form

Actor Sonam Kapoor in a sari made from molten wires by Rimzim Dadu at the Cannes film festival this year. Photo: PTIPremium
Actor Sonam Kapoor in a sari made from molten wires by Rimzim Dadu at the Cannes film festival this year. Photo: PTI

Reinventing the Patola weave with leather cords or Jamdani with silicone yarn, my design is about re-engineering existing raw material to create unpredictable textiles.

Growing up in India, in a family which made a business out of garment exports, my childhood was spent playing with fabrics and being exposed to the technical process of making clothes. It was only natural then that I take up fashion professionally. Clothes are a medium that allow me to explore, experiment and express. I don’t perceive fashion as trend-based, as contradictory as that may sound.

I am not from a textiles background, but the innate need to create my own fabrics, combined with the subconscious influence of our vast heritage of crafts and textiles, has led me to innovate and come up with some creative textiles in my work. For example, I worked on translating the shading effect of a traditional Ikat weave into metal wires of contrasting colours coming together to achieve the yarn-dyed effect. The play of light and shadow/transparency and opaqueness in a traditional Jamdani got a new twist with translucent silicone yarn (a type of rubber sheet shredded to form yarn) handwoven together.

Dadu’s silicone-Jamdani sari, displayed at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon last year.
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Dadu’s silicone-Jamdani sari, displayed at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon last year.

In the past, I have used materials like acrylic, fibreglass, raangda (a metal that melts and solidifies instantly), paper fused with fabric to form a new textile, rubber sheets, silicone, etc. I like the challenge that comes with working with a new material, slowly discovering its characteristics, how it reacts to water, heat, how it can be made malleable, user-friendly—and eventually learning to master it.

As a designer, I am usually asked what my design methodology is or how I come up with ideas. I like stumbling upon new materials, breaking these down and re-engineering them into textiles. I am not a cut-and-sew designer, and I can’t just pick a fabric off the shelf and make something out of it. I don’t sit with paper, sketch an entire collection and then get on with producing it. For me, it’s always a lot of experimentation with the material I am using, understanding its character and going back and forth from the machines to the drawing board. A collection always takes its own course, and the journey is self-evolutionary. As you dig deeper into a concept through the course of building a collection, you keep coming up with newer ideas. So I don’t like to restrict myself to fixed notions about what a collection should look like.

I transported it all—my machines, karigars (craftsmen), tools, the above-mentioned hand-made hand-weaving frames—to my show. I let the audience come in early, encouraged them to walk on the “ramp", to interact with our karigars, to see how we make our clothes, get a closer look at all our techniques, read the hand-outs, touch and feel our textures. The idea was to transport the audience to our studio and for them to see and experience the making of the collection. Even the invites that were sent out were written on small broken cement blocks to reflect a part of our studio.

It was an experiment, a small step towards achieving more transparency in an otherwise non-transparent industry, and make fashion, which may be perceived as mere “entertainment" by some, more educational and interactive.

A lot of people ask me if India is ready for fashion that almost borders on art installation. And my answer is yes. I have survived in this industry for eight years so far, doing things that I like, my way. One can never under-estimate the audience. I honestly feel that India is a breeding ground for creativity and innovation and there is space for all kinds of design.

Rimzim Dadu is a conceptual fashion and textiles designer based in Delhi.

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Published: 03 Jun 2016, 05:04 PM IST
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