“Designers David Abraham, Kevin Nigli and Rakesh Thakore transform the familiar to gloriously strange and the strange to the gloriously familiar.” That’s the last line in the preface of a small but valuable booklet distributed to the audience at the Abraham & Thakore show on Day Two of the ongoing edition of Lakmē Fashion Week x FDCI in Delhi. This booklet binds together sample swatches of materials used for the collection. Rice packs, wrappers of chips, gunny bags, trash plastics, kitchen foil, unspooled cassette tapes, discarded X-rays (the last have been used previously too by A&T) show the grime, dust and dumps of daily life in India. Not from a perspective of the economics of disposability but the possibility of circularity and the potential to find beauty where it is least expected. 

Shefali Shah wore her cop vibe with A&T.

Actor Shefali Shah opened the show in an embellished sari.

So let’s first gaze at the holy cows of this lineup. Beauty, imaginative audacity, a rather vast repertoire in material usage and silhouette interpretation. Actor Shefali Shah opened the show in a black solid sari embellished with shiny motifs made from discarded film tape and X-rays. Her look for the runway did not subscribe to any conventional prettiness and her hair and makeup suited a purposeful, attractive woman. Shah plays a cop in Delhi Crime, one of OTT’s most watched and critically appreciated crime dramas but that’s incidental. She wore her cop vibe with A&T and we clapped.

Lehenga skirts and jackets dotted the collection.

What followed were loose pants and fitted shirts, co-ord sets, several jacket interpretations, lehenga skirts, diaphanous jackets, a trench, skirts with different hemlines, fitted tops, long loose, off shoulder dresses. The one thing most garments had in common was shine and glitter. That’s where the Gilt Complex was evident, and perhaps for A&T, a little excessive, even though the patterning of discarded waste was where the design lesson lay. David Abraham, creative director at A&T, one of the three designers who drive this brand agrees that it is “occasion wear” and a “party” collection. Perhaps their first. If the intent was to go all out with the bling and shine vocabulary, they are successful. But a proportional restraint may have reined back the skew towards glitter in this collection which is perhaps its biggest win (for a certain market category) and wane (for a certain abiding loyalist who seeks less, not more). 

The collection uses embellishments and motifs made using toffee wrappers and rice coverings.

Where the collection hits the bull’s eye is in its questioning and quest, seeking beauty in the mundane, the discarded and offering “couture-like” garments. “What is beauty, if not perspective”—this question also a part of the collection note, returns you to the Italian medieval historian and philosopher Umberto Eco’s ideas on the “beauty of provocation”. “Avant-Garde has provocatively flouted all aesthetic cannons respected until now,” notes Eco in History of Beauty. “On the contrary, its aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes, to enjoy a return to archaic, to esoteric models…the rediscovery of material, startling representation of everyday objects in improbable contexts…”

However, the context here is not improbable. This is A&T after all which has been making this probable as their design DNA. At this moment, global and Indian fashion is trying to find a way out of its deculturation towards sustainability, circularity and reusability. 

A&T’s ‘contemporary modernity’ which is Indian in a globally pertinent way, is seldom cliched. It has long questioned the populist through content and research behind what we consume as their fashion. It intellectualises without revealing that part to the world, from idea generation and gestation making no room for cookie cutter simplification. And then, when it reaches a fashion form–a garment, a dress, pants, jackets, shirts, a sari, and a full collection, it merges into fashion-ability. Looks so easy with striking looks, wearability, affordability too (so far) while retaining its contemplation. The contemplative in A&T is decentred but influential. Rothko-inspired colour blocked ikat woven dresses or calligraphy, Morse code, or Braille in embellished or printed forms on garments (now a signature), hit viewers and wearers. They bring to the fore the might of handloom as well as non-conformism. It is easy to applaud because it is pretty to wear. You are not looking at academic or political expressions on clothes, you are looking at fashion. The ponderousness is not a lament. 
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A trench coat and loose pants from the lineup.

Most garments featured shine and glitter.

A gilet paired with a skirt.Next

“It is a political comment of course, yes,” says Abraham, arguing that beauty can’t just be found or created within and with precious and expensive materials. His tone belies neither brooding nor bragging when he mentions a collaboration with ragpickers, gently listing rice coverings, toffee wrappers, bin bags as the tools of “Finding Beauty”. Abraham is not promoting his politics. That’s why this writer wants to draw your attention to A&T’s gilt trip. It doesn’t need a couch. 

Several groups of A&T fans and buyers have been debating if the designers, their DNA and impact will be coloured by Reliance Retail Ventures Limited (RRVL), the company that holds a majority stake in the brand. Will they lose their signature in the jog to multiple stores and inventory multiplication expected by corporate level scaling up? ‘Finding Beauty’ brings some answers, now go look.