Love could happen on a Wednesday

Designer Shweta Gupta; an ensemble from the SWGT showcase. Pics/Satej Shinde

Shweta Gupta's proposed silence was a good place to start the Day 1 roster of designer shows at Lakme Fashion Week in partnership with Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) in Mumbai on Wednesday. But it was a silence already loud with a huge range of emotions and urges that looked beyond lust to convey Gupta's enduring love with days spent waking up at Almora; the cantonment town in Uttarakhand where she met her husband-business partner, Abhishek.

The minimal Atelier space at the Jio World Convention Centre offered a welcome pause from mandatory Insta-perfected fashion looks that have to shout to be heard. The audience could still draw a breath while watching the 23 looks unravel. "Love is a big part of my life," Gupta says. "But in my show, I was describing a love story of a day in the mountains. From the first streaks of sunlight with five-petal wildflowers bobbing their heads to crispy afternoons melting into evening glow and the romance the night calls with cicadas singing, I wanted to capture the situationship of a day in garments," explains Gupta, the creative mind behind the brand, SWGT. But why call it, A Periwinkle Wednesday? "It just happened… what do we talk about when we talk about love on a Wednesday?" she laughs.

Her spring/summer 2024 collection, filled with smock and tunic dresses, evening gowns, mini and floor-length skirts, and deconstructed shirts and cropped tops wore optical impressions of hills and pines, beds of berries and periwinkles. It was a quiet play on the idea of layering and transparency with fabrics like mulberry silk, Chanderi and zari linen behaving both as surface textures and as visual surrogates. "The idea was to bring in the dressing-up energy into handlooms; a little sheen, embroidery and a lot of structured tailoring with micro pintucks, quilting and applique," Gupta says.

Most importantly, this collection showed us a designer willing to re-examine her aesthetic and adapt it without ever giving up her identity. Literally so, as the otherwise reticent designer claimed her work via the show invite, which read, ‘By Shweta Gupta'. This was not a feminist pronouncement, she asserts, but inspired by Jane Austen. "Sense and Sensibility is my favourite [novel]. Men effectively owned and controlled the script within which a woman had to move and have her sense of being, so Austen could never claim her work as the author. Instead, she withheld her name and signed her books as, ‘By a Lady'."

But at heart, Gupta wants to position SWGT as a design-first brand. "Everything can't be about business. I am a creative person who designs from love [of handlooms]."

Big Daddy's Socks

Every fashion week, a viral accessory emerges from the well-papped catwalks at the shows. At a time when understatement is still a norm when it comes to menswear, the GenNext debutant designer Rohitash Notani of Rosani label gave us sock gators and paired them with chunky Mary Janes.

As trends go, sock gators (also known as sock suspenders) are hardly new. It is a classic menswear accessory consisting of an elastic band worn around the calf with clips or buttons designed to keep socks in place. Now, knee-high socks as a fashion statement might not signal ground-breaking, but it was interesting to see a visual dialogue that not only pushed gender boundaries but showed us a styled-up spin to the legs.

How Nachi got his groove on

Ask Mumbai designer Nachiket Barve about the concepts behind his fashion collections and he will lead you through fantastical word associations that boggle and challenge the mind. Ask him about his new look, and his straight-talking manner is searching for the right words.

Designer Nachiket BarveDesigner Nachiket Barve

For all his meteoric success, Barve was never a flashy showman in his personal dressing. A formal uniform of black shirt and Nehru jacket - usually in self-textured patterns - acted as a pin board for his many brooches. "Most of my job involves being in the studio, taking a lot of creative calls about colour and pattern, and my personal wardrobe naturally takes a backseat," he says.

At the ongoing Lakme Fashion Week x FDCI event however, Barve made a sartorial statement - off the runway - sporting a look quite unlike his past appearances. For starters, the sight of a T-shirt hinted at a shift of mindset and language. That's not all. He traded his trademark brooches and monogram crossbody bag for a self-designed oversized blazer and trousers accessorised maximally with platform clogs, and wrist and fingers stacked with silver jewellery. "I recently launched a Western wear line. Perhaps that has led to the needle shift in my head. I definitely see the [fashion] industry differently," Barve adds curiously.