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Browns applauds designer Rajesh Pratap Singh
Designer Rajesh Pratap Singh has scooped up the first accolades at the fifth Indian fashion week, winning prized applause from London's fashion Mecca, Browns.
Designer Rajesh Pratap Singh has scooped up the first accolades at the fifth Indian fashion week, winning prized applause from London's fashion Mecca, Browns.
"His show was well crafted, well executed and very well planned," said Albert Morris, the first ever Browns representative at an Indian fashion week that began in the capital Tuesday.
Morris said he was particularly impressed by the flavour and sense of purpose and direction displayed by Singh, one of the 57 designers participating in the annual event.
Browns' legendary owner Joan Burnstein is renowned for discovering great fashion sensibilities like those of John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Commes des Garcons, a talent she often dismisses as "hunch" or "gut instinct".
Whether Morris - in India to hunt for the big fashion name for the store - is getting that feeling about Singh is not certain but the signs look encouraging.
The person he has chosen has long been described as Indian fashion's hidden secret. Reticent, almost to mythical levels - his profiles, even for the fashion week, often come without the mug shot because he hates being photographed - Singh is as near an enigma as India has in fashion.
His clothes exude a sense of pervading simplicity and focus that is rare in the country's nascent fashion industry.
This year his collection has as its theme - (Swiss surrealist artist) H.R. Giger goes to Varanasi to meet the cult of Hindu god Shiva.
He covered the faces of his models in black satin and showed an intense collection of crimson, earth, ochre and black.
His leather falls in straight lines, sharp and steady as the music slow-hammering in the background. The rich earth-shattering browns of the jackets are sometimes streaked with blood and tear patches of black.
Samuel Butler once wrote: "Fashion is like god, man cannot see it in its holy of holies and live. And it is like god, increate, springing out of nothing, yet the maker of all things - ever changing, yet the same, yesterday, today and forever."
That is the fashion of Rajesh Pratap Singh. Whether it will now go to Browns - once a small boutique on the ground floor of 27 South Molton Street, now an international fashion hub - remains to be seen.
