Covid changed most of us in one way or another: while it kept us apart from dear ones, in some cases it also pushed us to think and consider our lives and work. Confined in his home country, India, designer Rahul Mishra didn't stop dreaming even when he and his family got Covid.
Passionate about nature, he started thinking about a home and studio in the Himalaya region, where he could create far away from distractions and just surrounded by striking views, colourful flowers and rare butterflies.
The dream became more real recently as he actually bought land in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. Here he hopes to build one day a sustainable home with a sublime mountain view, surrounded by nature and immersed in the purest air. In the meantime, as it takes time to build a proper house, he has transferred this obsession for a full immersion in nature in his new Haute Couture collection.
Entitled "The Enchanted", Mishra's new designs could be considered as studies of flowers and landscapes, interpreted in three ways: in the first case, the designer moved from the shapes of flowers, coming up with mini-dresses made of delicate pink and white petals that turned his models into flower girls. Volumes and puffed-up bubble-like silhouettes also contributed to recreate the silhouettes of flowers.
In the second case Mishra let flowers bloom and monarch butterflies fly on his suits and dresses: he literally covered these designs with three-dimensional embroidered floral tapestries and butterflies. For a while now, Mishra has been using butterflies as metaphors for the craftspeople working for him, they are indeed butterflies who must be protected by providing them with work.
In the third instance he reinterpreted the perspectives and views at different times of the day using the fabric as a canvas and reproducing on it a landscape complete with sky and clouds, green hills and colourful flowers.
The embroideries of the flowers weren't actually the result of the designer kaleidoscopic imagination, but inspired by real flowers that he captured on his mobile phone.
To accompany the collection Mishra also shot a video in a studio in Delhi: the atmosphere is unreal and fable-like, you can clearly see this is an artificial environment recreated inside and in a few scenes the lights hint at a futuristic space as if the models had just landed on a planet in bloom not with delicate flowers but with a poisonous vegetation.
Some may found Mishra's designs such as his bright tulle dresses and tulle ruffled tops with flower or butterfly appliqués matched with sequined trousers, maybe a bit too much (besides, a furry blue design covered in butterflies was a bit too reminiscent of a purple butterfly design in Moschino by Jeremy Scott's S/S 2018 collection View this photo and that may have been avoided), but there are skills to appreciate behind these pieces - some of them took indeed 2,000 hours to make.
Mishra supports sustainability and slow fashion and has currently got a team of 1,000 artisans divided between small villages and his 50,000-square-foot factory in the Noida suburb of New Delhi where around 300 people work. So, while this may be an enchanted collection about fantasy for Mishra, his hope to slow down fashion (the principle of slowing down production is an idea rooted in the Gandhian philosophy the designer studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad) and support artisans with work, may lead Mishra for real to a new and more ethical approach to fashion.
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