Meet the Dark Knight
At the recently concluded India Fashion Week, the young and the restless Prashant Verma shared with the world a saga of lost love. But on the runway...
At the recently concluded India Fashion Week, the young and the restless Prashant Verma shared with the world a saga of lost love. But on the runway, the designer wasn’t mourning his past; the presentation was only a celebration of the war that resides in him.
The sharp-on-the-edges, dark line of clothing was preceded by a short film titled Love Song, featuring Verma himself. So fascinated is he with its outcome that he now wants to consider film direction “seriously”.
“The film left nothing to imagination. I picked my deepest, private feelings and made them public,” he said. He said it was a personal tragedy that triggered the creative process and helped him put this “emotionally uninhibited” collection together. “I look at fashion in a cinematic way. Art, in this case fashion, mirrors emotions we seldom communicate. It was self-vengeance that helped me overcome the pain caused by love lost,” he revealed.
With an audio piece that featured sounds of carnage, the line was a potent mix of rebellious, outrageously inspired clothing. Embroidered jackets teamed up with ripped stockings catwalked besides black print jersey and flare trousers in silk. Verma, who has trained at fashion houses of design greats such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, also made ample use of wool to create coatdresses and shift dresses.
The young designer, staying true to his love for cinematic sounds by composers such as Hans Zimmer and Philip Glass, said it’s “the voices in my head” that drive him to the visual. “I’ve always believed that cinema is a far more superior medium of showcasing art. Unlike fashion, it’s intangible and has multi-sensory affect. I want to delve deeper into it,” he said.
Verma’s new film will be based on his personal experiences. “I tend to look internally to understand human conditions and strongly believe in self-portraiture,” he said.
