Flaunt your attitude, follow your heart
It would be a bit too early to compare Kolkata-based designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee with Christian Dior's John Galliano, but the one thing that they both share is how to tell a story beautifully.
It would be a bit too early to compare Kolkata-based designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee with Christian Dior's John Galliano, but the one thing that they both share is how to tell a story beautifully. This year at LIFW, like the past two years, Mukherjee has managed to work on a theme and unlike most designers has also managed to carry it forward. So fasten your seatbelts, this time it's the Frog Princess, a story inspired by Mukherji's seven year younger sister Payal, his muse, who used to stop eating to keep up to the preset standards of beauty. "Fashion is becoming so clinical and plastic that it lacks character, so my collection is beautiful, but it's not glamorous," says Mukherjee.
And unlike most who are bitten by the glamour bug, Mukherjee has given his collection a secondhand feel, in fact, an almost home-made vintage. "I've seen people who are not physically beautiful, always trying to be someone who we aren't. I've never been macho or played soccer, so I was considered not so hip and happening," says Mukherjee.
With this collection, Mukherjee hopes to redefine fashion and says that he wants to dress a woman who has the courage to be five feet tall and go to a party wearing flats and not stilettos.
"Actually it was Tagore who inspired me in his poem that said that we travel the world in search of beauty but you often find it in the dewdrops, a few steps away from home," says Mukherjee.
He translates this thought in his collection in this street-smart glamour, using imagination as embellishments, unplucked eyebrows and his sister Payal as the model.
"The jewellery that I've used is not the traditional gold, diamond or pearls but beads strung together with chiffon. Another thing that I've introduced in my collection this time around are sarees with stains, inspired by the fact that we all stain our clothes at some point or the other and here I am flaunting those stains," elaborates Mukherjee. But the underlying effort has been to move away from the perceived idea of beauty, slots and be who you really are!