Veteran designer David Abraham explains the subtle difference between style and fashion; the key to finding your personal look; what made him chose wild silk and how the internet is changing the landscape of fashion
By Asmita Aggarwal
If David Abraham of the famed duo Abraham & Thakore, was a time traveler the one era that he would like to revisit is the 60s. It was the best time for not just style, but youth culture and rock n roll. You had all these marvelous innovations, it was an iconic era which kind of set the tone for the generations to come. It saw the first mini skirt by Mary Quant which has withstood the test of time; the model Twiggy; the magician Yves Saint Laurent; Rolling Stones and of course, the game changers, The Beatles who revolutionised how people will view music henceforth, smiles David.
In a delightful journey that began for David 22 years ago, in 1992, when he first got noticed for his fitting tribute to textiles and humble motifs, today he looking at reviving those very classics by turning them around in a contemporary manner. If you see our kurta this time, you will see a refocusing of silhouettes; it comes with a churidar that has been given a hipster avatar with a bit of volume retaining the churis at the end, without changing much of the original form. Or the sari, it is pre-stitched and turned into a wrap skirt, so classicism has been retained by new interpretations and a play with proportion, he says.
After all, fashion is a lot like architecture it is all about forms, shapes, linearity and geometry and David says this year volume will be a wild card entry on the catwalk. At the end of the day, everyone is here to sell clothes, so David confesses that some shapes work well on fashion models, and not on customers, so adaptation is the name of the game for him. With the number of designers multiplying, the concept of designer wear has grown even to Tier 2 cities, which is excellent for business. People have become aware of quality products and even though the competition increases, its great as we will be able to cater to a country of a billion, he confirms.
Offering near perfect collections, for two decades doesnt really put much pressure on David as he believes with age you learn not to give a damn; but on a serious note I am now more comfortable in my skin.
Not designing but the peripherals do (business side) sap the energy out of David sometimes making him feel that the hectic-ness of fashion does not give him the time to develop an idea fully. We do lounge wear, home, four seasons in a year, it kind of keeps you on the edge. Many ideas I would have liked to have given more thought to and done in-depth research, I couldnt due to the paucity of time, but I would have liked to, he confides.
Interestingly, what keeps this genius going is the gauntlet that the fashion world constantly flings his way. And he admits the newness is the reason he loves doing what he is doing. It is amazing that in the internet age we get to watch within a few seconds what is happening in Cape Town in street fashion or music or anything else, which is magical. And it is this alacrity in fashion that gives me the fuel to create something fantastical, he says.
The creative field is wrought with uncertainty, and David understands that quite well by now, the different solutions he looks for things does cloud him with self-doubt. I think, what keeps me going is my interest in art and crafts, so if I see an artist sitting on Gond region of Bihar doing cutting-edge work, it makes me curious and that I feel is the fountainhead of all design, keeping that curiosity factor alive and kicking, he says.
David is one of the few people who is honest enough to admit that fashion has nothing to do with style, but style is something that must be inculcated independent of fashion. Fashion is about understanding elegance and being appropriate and that kind of becomes style, he clarifies. And if a woman was to ask him the key to finding her personal style, David says, that it is a two-step procedure. It begins with being clear about age, body type, profession, basic realities. And this goes on to aspirations, as fashion is all about belonging. What we wear is what we want the world to think about us. Somewhere between where aspiration and reality meet is where a woman generally finds her personal style, he elaborates.
With the concept of fast fashion gaining ground, David believes it has altered the definition of timelessness, so anything that lasts for five years or more is a classic.
Crafting a story out of wild silk which means silk which is not cultivated or farmed forms the base of his Autumn-Winter 2014 line. We have looked for such uncultivated silk and narrowed down our search to threetussar, Muga and Eri. So the colours of the silk produced this way is quite irregular, inconsistent as the worms are not bred on a diet, with the gold fading and brightening at odd places making it a riveting ride to observe. It is also about spinning a story around an urban womans wardrobe, so we took yarns out of Bihar and Assam and gave them to Ikkat weavers, who had never worked with them before to create and change the shape and form, he says.
The result was a mélange of colours from pale ivories to gold and bronze as well as black. With easy shapes A & T have introduced lightweight and form flattering jackets and coats to make it a cosy winter even though the biggest hurdle was not ideological but technical in this line—Urban Shikar. We tried to do something we havent done before, so the processes took almost three months. Something we had given in November has come to us now because of the complex procedure, but it is also the fun part as it pushes you to perform, he concludes.