When fashion takes centre stage

Indian begums and British vicereines were interlinked in their love of zardozi. It is the first international luxury brand to do an official calendar show in India, and highlights creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri’s decades-old relationship with the Mumbai-based Chanakya Craft Collective. To see a house like Dior showing their pre-Fall collection — a proper calendar show, not just an offsite celebratory show — is a big deal.” One with the fashion capitals ‘India in Fashion’ at NMACC has borrowed garments from 15 international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Paris; private collectors, such as the Ambanis themselves and actor Sonam Kapoor; the personal archive of the show’s curator Hamish Bowles; and the collections of India’s biggest designers, including Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla, and Ritu Kumar. In the coffee-table book, Bowles concludes on this note, “As Rahul Mishra becomes the first Indian designer to present his haute couture in Paris, and Sabyasachi opens a flagship store in Manhattan, India continues to impact global fashion, as it has through the centuries.” Dior in the house Like many fashion directors, Maria Grazia Chiuri usually dresses in a uniform. I personally wanted to celebrate and showcase the incredible knowledge India offers to international fashion in the field of embroidery, the mastery of the artisans who continue to work on this craft, and the commitment of Chanakya’s founders to preserving India’s history and culture.” At the launch of the pre-Fall 2023 collection in December last year, ‘Vogue Runway’ had written: “Mirrored embroidery, hot pink sequins, rich golden borders, and filigree lace are all deftly elevated to a level of sophistication that could only come about through the joint ambition of Indian artisans and a French house to make something new in the service of modern, wearable fashion.” It is as Chiuri told them, “I work with India every day.”