Beauty, truth and transparency

These are the values that Pavitra+ embodies as it joins soon-to-be-married brides and grooms embarking on their Pavitra Bandhan

KText by Nonita Kalra Photos shot exclusively for HT Brunch by Rahul Dhankani

allol Datta has long been a polarising figure in fashion. You love him or hate him, but you cannot ignore him, because he uses fashion for a purpose: for dialogue, dissent, dissection. When I speak to him one Saturday afternoon, it’s easy to see that hasn’t changed. In a country dominated by conversations on craft, textiles, and artisans, he remains detached from fabric. In fact, it’s the last thing he thinks about, he says, often choosing music for his shows before textiles for the collection. Deeper into our conversation, he reveals he isn’t much interested in the human form either.

“I don’t really think of humans. I think of the shape and the form of clothing, how it is layered with other pieces, how it will behave when it is mounted on different forms. It’s the human who has to adjust to the garment; the garment won’t adjust the other way around. I don’t acknowledge humans while drafting patterns so, in a weird way, I think that makes it more inclusive when it comes to sizing. The same garment can be worn by you, could probably be worn by me, depending on the silhouette. It would just skim our body or drape differently on both of us,” says the designer, a graduate from Central St Martins, London, and National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kolkata.

COMFORT WITH DISCORD

Like most conversations these days, ours takes place on Zoom. And I realise that life as a virtual meeting place has had an interesting

“I DON’T REALLY THINK OF HUMANS. I THINK OF THE SHAPE AND FORM OF CLOTHING, HOW IT IS LAYERED WITH OTHER PIECES, HOW IT WILL BEHAVE WHEN IT IS MOUNTED ON DIFFERENT FORMS” –KALLOL DATTA

ramification. It is easier to let down your guard and be guarded at the same time. Just as Kallol and I are chatting, like old friends, or so I think, he immediately points out that he has a lot of “acquaintances” but not too many friends. It is a distinction he maintains. Such specificities are what make the designer. He measures his words, and disperses them with care. Something that was visible right from his debut as part of the Lakme Fashion Week Summer/resort 2007 Gen Next show. With a surprisingly vulnerable collection that showed exactly who he was – zero embellishments, zero artifice – he announced a new sensibility in fashion.

“His youthful bravado, his intellectualisation of fashion, and his audacity to show a middlefinger, so to speak, to those who relegated fashion to only the exorbitance of pomp and show, was what really delighted the budding journalist in me,” says Bandana Tewari, a sustainability advocate and authority on fashion, of her introduction to Kallol’s work. “What resonates the most for me is his comfort with discord, his ability to play with contradictions and offer a ringside view of the irony and beauty of fashion.”

THE ‘HEAVY’ DESIGNER

Deconstructed clothing that was carefully constructed led fashion editors to use words like anti-fit, genderless and “ethno grunge”. But these descriptions seem erroneous when you consider how Kallol describes his process: “I enjoy pattern cutting. It’s been so many years now that I’m able to do it without a ruler, a French curve or any tools. I am able to do it freehand, and that’s the part I really enjoy the most.”

Over the years, Kallol has also been called “dark”, “angsty” and sometimes even a “problem child”; he, on the other hand, thinks of himself as India’s “heaviest designer” (half in jest and half seriously).

The truth is, he prefers to ‘un belong’. That’s how he shapes his approach to his audience, too. He isn’t indifferent to viewers; rather, he goes to the extent of making them feel uneasy. Unwelcome. And he is involved in each step to the extreme end. One season, he had his entire line sheet in Korean, inspired by a visit to the Ewha Womans University Museum in Seoul, and all the Korean series and films he had been watching. For a show in Delhi in 2013, he brought in extra air conditioners: “I wanted to make the space feel as uninviting as possible. I wanted it really cold as I didn’t want people spending too much time at the exhibits.”

“I saw his work as provocations which should be included in exhibitions of contemporary art, as well as home of art collectors.” – Mayank Mansingh Kaul, Writer and Curator of textiles

"A sari designed by Kallol has been part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collection since 2015." – Rachel Dedman, Curator, Victoria and Albert Museum