NEW DELHI: With the use of avant-garde designs, indigenous craftsmanship and fabric woven from recycled plastic and industrial material, Delhi-based fashion designer Amit Aggarwal has become a force to reckon with in. Launched in 2012, his eponymous couture label has also become a go-to label for B-town. Such is the positioning of his brand that Katy Perry was also seen wearing an upcycled skirt made with vintage patola and neon polymer for an editorial photoshoot during her visit to India last November. As Aggarwal gears up for a grand finale at Lakmé Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2020, we caught up with him for a chat. Excerpts:
Run us through the mood board for your LFW collection, Axil.
Axil is built around a vision of the future; a world where natural, manmade, real and unreal distinct things exist together to create a harmonious entity. It is a visualisation of an unreal wildflower growing in a concrete or metallic building. Overall, we spent three months on this collection.
Tell us more about the surface techniques and silhouettes.
The surfaces involve a lot of indigenous craftsmanship, which comes from meticulous hand embroidery and weaving. But what stands out as our unique design language, is the fact that we use a lot of industrial waste, polymer details and recycled rubber to create these surfaces. We are trying to understand new age materials alongside the history and the beauty of Indian craftsmanship, and this lends itself into creating completely new surfaces and textures.
How and when were you introduced to polymers for the first time?
All of us have grown up with the use of polymers. It is the basic form that makes plastic. As a brand, what we want people to understand is that something that will ultimately end up in a landfill can also be made useful through couture.
What inspired you to go in the direction of sustainability?
Today, clothing is your voice. It solves the purpose of protection and social status but more than that. It is about the choices that you make as a person. Clothes embody your beliefs. This explains our use of alternative material in the clothes we make. We’ve been using polymers ever since we as a label started creating clothes, but I have always been subversive about my opinions. When sustainability became a talking point, I realised that we had always worked in that direction. Today, the world has taken notice of things that it didn’t care about a decade ago.