For over four decades, I have lived and worked with textiles - designing them, handling them, experimenting with them and in the process, becoming totally mesmerised by the infinite world of creativity. For years it was my primary source of oxygen and kept my passion for innovation, alive. I have dreamt textures, visualised colour combinations and obsessed over prints. I have spent years admiring how a piece of yardage transforms and acquires allure and character under a designer's watchful eye.
Naturally, I assumed I knew a thing or two about clothing.
Until I learnt that the fashion industry had a language of its own and portrayed a dress, not just as a dress, but as an exalted art form.
Give me a piece of fabric and I see just fabric. Stitch it into a garment and I see a dress. Add some embroidery, sequins or crystals and I may even call it party wear. Over to the fashion critic, and almost instantly, my mundane vocabulary seems inadequate.
Forty years in textiles have taught me the value of craftsmanship. The fashion world has taught me that the secret to reaching dizzying heights, lies not merely in the garment, but in the story woven around it. A well crafted narrative is the key.
There are Dresses and there is Couture, and although they are both created from fabric, they inhabit different worlds. I realized that my perspective was not couturesque enough.
A dress is happily democratic. It is worn, washed, ironed, stored away in a cupboard and repeated sooner or later. Couture is adorned, and comes with an entourage - photographers, stylists and a trail. Repeating couture is a sin.
Somewhere between the local darzi and the red carpet, the dress sheds its modest image, acquires an air of aristocracy and evolves into a couture creation. Add a designer label to a dress, send it to the Paris runway and bingo, it is now known as haute couture.
But there is more to haute couture than meets the eye. To the unversed, it is elusive because there is a certain mystique surrounding it. What baffles me is the linguistic grandiloquence that accompanies it - the insistence that clothing must be verbally elevated to a certain level, before it can be certified as luxury.
There are certain fashion-related expressions that leave me flummoxed.
I may say a dress is simple, but a fashion critic will say it is "minimalist, and displays a balance of restraint". Did the designer experience a funds crunch, hence kept it simple to cut costs?
I might describe a neckline as modest, while the fashion critic might say the decolletage is "prudent and does not challenge convention".
I might say the dress shines, while the critic would perhaps say the "interplay of fabric and light adds a soft and ethereal luminosity to the gown".
I would describe a woman dressed in a fully black or white dress, as wearing a single colour, but the fashionista would say she is making a "sophisticated statement in monochromatic restraint"
I might admire a saree and call it elegant, but the expert would describe it as "six yards of an exquisite indigenous ensemble with a sweeping shoulder drape cascading down to the earth".
A celebrity does not carry a hand bag or a vanity bag. She carries a "signature statement accessory that is an extension of her identity". It may resemble a flower, a box, a miniature sculpture or an object that could look like it was conceptualized while the designer had a migraine.
A favourite expression of fashion critics - "the drape is a contemporary celebration of feminine energy."
I sometimes wonder how a fashion critic would visualize a fisherwoman, in a nine yard saree (navvari) on a railway platform, boarding a Mumbai Local as it screeches in at 8 -10 am. That for me, would be the most compelling celebration of femininity. There is no grander couture than the navvaari, moving through a sea of humanity - not designed just to be admired, but worn to work, to walk, to carry and to survive. She gathers her saree, squeezes past arms, legs, bodies and baskets, and plunges into the train, with herself and pomfret intact.
There is no choreography, no photographer or stylist here. Her drape is functional, her grace is unrehearsed. The critic would perhaps call this a spirited display of vivacity, navigating the urban landscape. I would just say she is getting on with life, in a saree, earning her livelihood. No amount of verbal sparkle can overshadow the artistry of practical, comfortable clothing designed to simply pull through the drudgery of a hard working day.
The dress vs couture discussion is a tussle between verbs and adjectives. While the glitter, architectural silhouettes and asymmetric hemlines rule the runway, I am unapologetically "old school" and believe that however spectacular a garment maybe, it must eventually serve the purpose for the woman wearing it. The ramp can make statements to be heard and deliberated upon in rarefied parts of the fashion world, but the rest of us must attend weddings, eat meals, board buses and just get on with our lives.
Latha Raghuram.