Before it was considered nouveau and distasteful, bling was for long the privilege of the rich and powerful. Today, designers like Tarun Tahiliani and Rohit Bal create costumes fit for modern royalty, embellished with delicate sequins and beads, gota patti and naqshi, muqaish and zari, Swarovski crystals and resham thread. Hours of skilled manual labour go into re-creating the traditional crafts that once delighted the maharajas. And it’s not only Indian designers who rely on embroidery to seduce and entice. The houses of Dior, Etro, Lanvin, Gucci, Armani, Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Elie Saab, Marchesa, Alexander McQueen and numerous others showcase their glittering creations (prêt or couture) season after season. The art of jewellery is recreated on clothes that transform the wearer from ordinary and practical to glamorous and ethereal.
The History
When All That Glitters asked me to write this feature about the idea of embellishment as wearable bullion, my mind automatically travelled back to medieval times, when religious injunctions or sumptuary laws forbade ostentatious displays of wealth. Both in India and in the West, this was a time of innovation in dressing, necessitated by the need for the rich and powerful to distinguish themselves through the clothes they wore. In Europe, in cities like Paris (the birthplace of modern fashion), women wearing gold crosses were fined on the streets, while dressmakers invented ways of showing off while skirting around these laws. In India, the Mughals commissioned fabrics woven out of pure gold and silver threads from the weavers of Benaras in the face of pious rules that eschewed jewellery and expounded austerity and restraint. Creators of clothes and accessories were taxed with finding new ways of making everyday dressing a ‘precious’ experience for those with the wherewithal to demand them. Horn and metal buttons were replaced with gold nuggets and priceless stones. Necklines began featuring embroideries that framed the wearer’s face as would a necklace. Girdles transformed from sturdy leather ones into bejewelled, tinkling trinkets.
And so it continues even to this day. Its just the context and user that’s changed, evolved. From royalty and the clergy, the use of bejewelled garments has trickled down to the masses and the classes who want to wear them; perhaps to show they’ve arrived, or maybe to indulge their decadent tastes.
The Designers
Tarun Tahiliani, one of the country’s foremost couturiers, has made a signature of digitally-printed tunics and T-shirts. He endows them with multi-coloured, jewellery-like designs that are highlighted with crystals and beads. As intricate as a jeweller’s work, they sell for a fraction of the price of a kundan necklace, but wrap the wearer in the opulence of a bygone era.
In contrast, a designer like Sabyasachi Mukherjee, known best for his use of multiple, often mismatched, borders on saris and lehengas, relies on hand-work done by karigars from across his home-state Bengal and other parts of the country. Unlike Tahiliani’s modern interpretation of decadence, Mukherjee’s saris and anarkalis take a more traditional approach, using the weight of thousands of skilled hands working with sequins and beads.
Any fashion journalist from the West would take these to be our version of haute couture, a French term that loosely translates into ‘high fashion’. To us, however, these creations are geared more towards the festive and wedding season, with women reserving western couture for dressy evenings that don’t require something traditional.
Still, embellishment isn’t restricted to festive costumes. Alexander McQueen’s last collection, before Sarah Bailey took over after the designer’s unfortunate death, featured creations composed of feathers that had been dipped in gold (paint, of course). Marchesa and Elie Saab regularly send out evening gowns dripping with sparkling sequins and crystals, as does Indian-origin designer Naeem Khan, one of New York’s favourite evening-wear creators. The expense and effort involved is great, and the result fantastic.
Anand Kabra, one of the rising stars of the Indian fashion firmament, specializes in modernizing traditional embroideries. His approach differs from others in that he experiments with newer forms and designs in the same mode of embellishment. “I try to create more contemporary versions, taking inspiration from the wealth of crafts that India has to offer,” he says. Another designer who treats embroideries and jewel-inspired designs to fabulous effect is the genius Anamika Khanna. Her designs often feature antique-looking hand-work that recall a glorious past even as her garments make a modern style statement.
JJ Valaya, who sometimes uses up to 30 varieties of embellishment on a single lehenga, once spoke to me about the importance of embroidery. “It’s all about painstaking effort and the intricacy of the patterns that the craftsman is able to achieve, not about the weight of the lehenga.” If this reminds you of the carat-weight versus design value argument often indulged in by those buying jewellery, it should come as no surprise. Embroideries, for their intricacy, effort, man-hours, and care, are the clothing equivalent of the former.
And this is something that the house of Satya Paul, one of the country’s oldest designer labels, understands well. Beginning with printed saris in the ’80s, the brand today boasts of a couture line of occasion and bridal wear that features traditional embroidery crafts from across the country.
“We want to bring embellishments into a modern context, and to give them a new form and shape while remaining true to their heritage,” says a designer from the Satya Paul studio.
The Market
No wonder then that some of the foremost couture houses in the world come to India to source their embellishment needs. Dries Van Noten has an over 20-year-old history with the craftspeople of Kolkata, while Christian Louboutin relies heavily on his friend Jean-Francois Lesage, a French brodeur who is based in Chennai. Job-work units in Lucknow supply immaculate chikankari to the likes of Stella McCartney and Chloé and Kashmiri paisley-patterned crewel work inspires many of Etro’s collections.
However, far be it from anyone to claim that India is the only country with fabulous embellishments. Each part of the world has, through history, developed techniques of enhancing special-occasion outfits that seem, feel and indeed are more precious than those worn ordinarily. And today, the idea of jewellery as embellishment has become an industry force; a mover of economies that counts retail as a major market force. And all this stems from a primitive desire to simply look good, and to stand out from the crowd.
(The writer is a fashion columnist and works as Deputy GM, Marketing & Communications, at Genesis Luxury)