Chittaranjan Park-based designer, Sunita Shanker’s Autumn-Winter ’22 collection titled ‘Autumn Potpourri’ is a medley of colours, textures, prints, and integrated crafts, including signature bandhani, running stitches, pin tucks along with embroideries and prints. Blending style and crafts seamlessly and reaffirming the brand’s ideology of handmade, the collection comprises flexible single styles that can be teamed by the wearer as desired. Focusing on upcycled silhouettes, ‘Autumn Potpourri’ primarily consists of repurposed silk saris collected before and during the lockdown from temples across South and East India.
“My collections are always an ongoing process, they run into each other. The pieces [in ‘Autumn Potpourri’] were basically silk saris collected from temples across South and East India, mostly kanjivarams sans borders that are usually sold exclusively for use in temples to be draped around a deity. Once their purpose is served, the saris are usually wasted and since they cannot be thrown away—as they have been used to adorn the deity—they serve no real purpose. So, I decided to purchase a lot of them just before and during the pandemic and I’m still finding ways to repurpose or upcycle them,” shares Sunita.
Giving us an insight into her creative process, the designer adds, “The process is a long one. First, we have to bring back the sheen to the silk and so we dye it again. Then we give it for kantha; that was a blessing in disguise for us because it kept the artisan community occupied during the lockdown when work was scarce. Therefore, these collections of mine involving upcycled saris have to be small edits as the volume of work produced under these conditions cannot be large, especially because we really need to give each of these pieces a lot of attention.”
Focusing on jackets, overgarments, kimonos, shirts, tops, jumpsuits, dresses, tunics and trousers in red, burgundy, berry, carmine, forest green, midnight green, dark blue, Prussian blue, and black—‘Autumn Potpourri’ limits its 65+ silhouettes to fabrics such as silks, cotton silks and chanderis.
“Nobody wants to touch old fabric. Even the artisans didn’t want to work on old saris and needed some convincing. But I wanted to use all this amazing fabric I collected. Our work with bandhani always continues and so, you will also see a lot of bandhani work in black, white, and red in this collection too. But the focus will shift to kantha with some pieces also featuring machine-embroidered motifs, which just helps to enhance the piece,” Sunita concludes.
Rs 6,000 onwards