A walk inside the archives of fashion designer Tarun Tahiliani

From the outside, it looks like an office room straight out of a James Bond film. There are glass walls, dim lights, cement grey-coloured floor tiles and pillars, rows of cupboards, two employees glued to their computers and CCTV cameras watching your every move.

At the end of the 900 sq. ft fireproof room are rows of cream-coloured compactors. Inside lie three decades of custom-made couture by Tarun Tahiliani, who, along with Anita Dongre, J.J. Valaya, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, belongs to the first generation of India’s couturiers.

Each compacter, somewhat like a sliding shelf that dramatically reduces the space needed to store each creation, while keeping it safe from humidity, moisture and other elements that damage fabric, is like a time travel machine, taking one back to a particular obsession in the designer’s oeuvre or period in India’s relatively short couture history. There’s a swatch of beige monochrome chikankari, which became Tahiliani’s signature in the late 1990s. Another compactor holds gota-patti work picked out with couching stitches 23 years ago. Yet another reveals a four-year-old velvet swatch with beads dangling from each motif, creating a swishing sense of movement even when the fabric is at rest. Some swatches are labelled “Nita Ambani”, material that was used to make garments for her. Elsewhere in the archive room are Victorian-era books dedicated to different kinds of lacework.

Over 8,000 swatches, panels, sketches, books, photographs, textiles, sample garments, prototype outfits and embroideries reside in the five-year-old archive room, located in the basement of Tarun Tahiliani’s Gurugram atelier. Each piece has a barcode containing details of the year, material/embroidery and the collection it belongs to. “We got late building it (they started working on the archive during the covid-19 pandemic); I have lost many swatches. We had artisans who were the only ones who could do certain kinds of embroidery, and they are no longer with us. If I don’t have those swatches, I will never be able to replicate them,” says Tahiliani, 63, sitting in a hall upstairs, his desk crowded with swatches, sketches, and corsetry “hips”.

In front of him is a rack from which hang archival creations, including plain linen kurtas, shibori blouses and a long black anarkali—they are light, wearable and miles away from the embellished lehngas he’s known for now. He’s in the middle of finalising a collection that will be presented on 16 January to mark 30 years of the brand at the British Residency in Hyderabad.

From the few pieces of the collection that I saw during the fittings (the collection is under wraps till the showcase), the themes were clear: Draping styles inspired by different regions of India and Mughal era-inspired motifs with influences of British tailoring.

These themes extend to what fills the cupboards inside the archive room. There’s a Chinese-style printed fabric from the 1980s, when Tahiliani’s brand was called Ahilian, shaped into a draped dress. A belted sari from the 2000s shows one of his several iterations of the concept sari, synonymous with the brand. More themes emerge as you sift through the compactors. There is striking malkha washed enough times to make it feel fluid, followed by a swatch that looks like a textile version of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (he has never used the fabric). You can see what the designer and his artisans were creating during the summer of 1990, the winter of 2002 and the spring of 2016.

“Sometimes I forget what I made when and how. But now, we have managed to recreate lost costumes because of the archive,” says Tahiliani. The room is a shrine to the Tarun Tahiliani brand, and each item is treated with as much reverence. If a piece is taken on loan, it is tracked until the return is complete. In between, calls are made to the borrower to check that the piece is in good shape. The archive is open to the public on request.

In fashion, past designs are not seen as relics but as foundations for future work. In fact, the archive is like a petri-dish for forward design-thinking. Yet, surprisingly, not many such archive rooms, controlled for climate, temperature and light, exist in Indian fashion. Ritu Kumar, often referred to as the first lady of Indian fashion, reportedly has over 10,000 archival pieces but they aren’t organised. Some leading designers are contemplating building archives, but few fashion houses have opened their archive to the outside world. While the Abraham & Thakore archive is open to see, it isn’t digitally catalogued as a fully functioning archive should be.

“A good archive is one where your material is organised ruthlessly and used daily,” says Pramod Kumar K.G., co-founder of Eka Archiving Services, a museum and cultural advisory firm that has created archives for Anokhi and Amrapali. Eka has also designed the Tarun Tahiliani archive in a way that there’s space for newer creations as well. “You should be able to find whatever you want within a second, and it’s an expensive affair. You need the optimum lighting, temperature, and humidity, at all times. Plus, conservators need to regularly check for mould.”

When I ask Tahiliani what drove him to build his archive, he says, “Tomorrow, whoever takes over my position to write the next chapter, they will have a reference point. I’m building my legacy. I’m systematising my memory.”