Untitled - Autumn/Winter 2010-11

'Each collection is like a lover i had for six months. It engages me everyday, reveals itself to me slowly….evolves and helps me evolve with it. It's like exploring a relationship. Falling in love with an idea is exactly like falling in love with a person…I love that period when love is fresh,young and naive…nothing brings more joy to the heart than being in love.I feel blessed that every six months i have a new affair , a new passionate engagement. Sometimes you leave some stories incomplete but in your heart you know that you will come back to them; sometimes the affair is passionate , fulfilling and burns you out completely and you just move on …looking for new lovers.'

Untitled

Varun Sardana

Autumn/Winter 2010-11

This collection is more about a mood than about a specific inspiration.  This collection, for me, is like a walk through my dreamscape, a walk through the avenues and bylines of my imagination. Because the inspiration was so amorphous, I wanted to distill the collection into its bare elements.- therefore I decided to stick with a monochromatic color palette of blacks, with the only elements of color coming in with the accessories and makeup. I wanted the focus to be purely on the silhouettes and the textures without any intervening distractions of color.

The silhouettes for this collection have a definite form, adding to or enhancing the curves of the body. The look is strong but I have steered away from making the collection too military or masculine but have worked around a more tribal form of female beauty where the woman is strong yet maintains her femininity. In tribal cultures, women do a lot of hard physical labour, yet lose none of their earthy sexuality. I wanted to strike such a balance even with this collection.

From the very beginning, my initial idea for the show was to recreate a bare spartan space, devoid of any formal trappings of a runway show. I wanted the audience to feel like that they had stumbled upon a strange shamanistic ritual- weird, a bit intimidating and alien, yet inescapably beautiful. Therefore, I ripped off the ramp to expose the floorboards and removed all seating so that the audience had to sit on the floor and witness the show, just like watching a primeval ritual.

The fabrics for the collection are Italian wools, Felt and Silk. I have explored many forms of surface texturing with felt, using hand cut and hand appliqued forms.  I prefer working with basic fabrics and applying various hand surface techniques to them to transform their character. All the final fabrics have been developed in-house using age-old hand-craft techniques and new age forms. All the surface explorations are in 3-D adding a new dimension and shape to the garments.