Using scraps and textile waste from her fashion collections over the years, designer Payal Jain resurrects them for an art ensemble to invoke the “soul”

The big decline of fashion for fashion’s sake has made trends, drops, seasonal collections or hasty impressions ineffective in driving demand or desire. Among the many inflections and reflections that fashion has brought to its creative economy as a consequence, the surge of art x fashion is perhaps the sharpest given the responses it evokes. Fashion as art and the reciprocal interest of art in fashion (as well as textiles, embroidery, craft, plus the deep and fast-depleting mine of the hand-made) potentiates multi-faceted statements. These explorations speak for a brand’s collaborative possibility and opens doors, especially for fashion designers, to archive their work in formats they may not have explored on the runway.

The exhibition features 12 textile-art installations.

One instance of this new wave turning into an established order is senior designer Payal Jain’s exhibition collection titled ‘Soul of A Woman’. First launched in 2023, it opened to select audiences for a few weeks, with specially developed display tunnels as scenography to contextualise the artistic aesthetic. The exhibition is now at the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy in New Delhi. Jain’s display is the first such at the Innovation Gallery, curated by FDCI chairman Sunil Sethi as part of a series of fashion x art formats that will continue to be shown there.

The space itself is inside the newly reopened Textiles Gallery II, which shows archival textiles which have lived in the Craft Museum’s collections for many decades and are representative of India’s artisanal heft.

To a reviewer, ‘Soul of a Woman’ as the title suggests is wrapped around Jain’s personal sentiments, emotions and existentially potent moments in life. “Art has always been my muse,” she writes in the press note.

Textile artist Bappaditya Biswas, art curator Ina Puri, designer Payal Jain and artist Debasish Mukherjee.

Each piece in the ensemble is created from scraps and textile discards from her collections over the years. The viewer is treated to sculpturally defined interpretations of fabric and textiles mounted on specially designed mannequins. They denote a certain “form” for the female body that seems to be resolutely positioned in life, art and fashion. Threads and crochet weaves, or knits and other details of some exhibits are pulled out and away from the main body and stretched over frames made from wood, metal and other materials. They render new shapes.

To infuse life into the scraps of her lifetime work as a fashion designer, Jain has used bandhani, kantha and most alluringly crochet work on the fabrics. Each piece is in ivory white, or “kora” as she calls it.

Textile artisans of diverse expertise—from Kutch to Kanchipuram, Maheshwar to Varanasi—have enabled this conversation between fabrics.

For this writer, the most compelling part was the imaginative use of threads, knits, buttons, shells, wood and natural textiles. Florals, rosette formations, knits in beehive shapes, crocheted bodices and collars, textiles sculpted to follow structure and determination. And taut dresses with fabric wound in several techniques, giving an impression of the innards of a complex garment more than its top, ready-to-wear, flamboyant skein.

The artworks incorporated textile waste and scraps from Jain’s collections over the years.

Watch the exhibit also for the use of ivory as the absence of colour, the formidable presence of white-cream and the form of the artworks speak to a certain resolution, a clarity. The first step towards the soul.

‘Soul of A Woman’ is on display at The Innovation Gallery, at the National Crafts Museum & Hastkala Academy, New Delhi until November 1, 2024.