Below all that metal, goth and rock is a heart that beats for women, Kanika Saluja Choudhary of the label Annaika is pro women in more ways than one. Not because her clothes are feminist, androgynous or as she says, edgy but also because she sticks to what she knows best. It is a bit like Gaultier, and the Moulin Rouge woman, sexy at night and a feminine, working girl in the day, you know what you are good at, in time, you will master it, she adds.
Living most of her life in US, marriage brought her back to India three years ago, and if you ignore the hairstyle and fuchsia pink lips that Kanika loves, you will notice that her quilting is clean and she has dabbled in black for the first time in 16 years. This was a year of many first for me, I had never done copper, we had worked with gunmetal (brass with electroplated gold), as the metal plating on copper is tough and takes forever to finish. Black which I have never done, was also new for me, as it went with the A/W theme and it reflected the theme behind my collection, she adds.
Hoping to dress women like her, in her 30s and 40s, Kanika insists her clothes are for real women, with curves. There is an ease to my fits, they are very woman friendly, I have a size 6 to a size 12-14 coming to me, so I have not restricted myself to dressing divas, she adds.
Importing most of her metal studs, which are then hand stuck to garments (she guarantees they wont pop off), which took the theme of birth (purity), with the colour peach, then dungeon (green) and poison (black) to show her being infected by the corruption in the world. My muse is a strong woman who has an independent voice and is ready to break the shackles of restraints that society often inflicts on her and what better way to show it than with goth, she concludes.