(From top) Actress Tania Zaetta in body paint on the Tantra bartop; models at the Fashion Police show on Friday night. Pictures by Rashbehari Das

What: Showing of designer Neeta Bhargava’s fall-winter 2006-07 collection to kick-off a series of fashion events titled Fashion Police.

Where: Tantra at The Park.

When: Friday, at the stroke of midnight.

The show: It’s not every night that Calcutta gets to see a sizzling Australian actress flaunting body paint and bare essentials on the bartop.

So when Tania Zaetta opened the show at Tantra at midnight, the otherwise lukewarm Calcutta crowd was seen cheering and clapping lustily.

The Salaam Namaste babe was beautifully painted, from her neck to her high boots, with bronze and silver floral motifs on a black base. After Tania’s body beautiful, it was left to national models like Gauhar Khan, Sonalika Sahay, Archana Vijaya, Vibhinita and Arati Sharma, along with Calcutta girls Sreshthaa and Jessica, to parade the clothes.

An extension of Neeta’s Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WLIFW) line, the collection titled Fatal Attraction was a mix and match of the three sequences the designer had displayed at WLIFW. The fall-winter 2006-07 line is split into three parts ? Bronze-Sculpture, Yin and Yang, Coal and Flames.

The colour stories of the three sequences are black-and-bronze, black-and-white and black-and-red. Friday’s 25-minute show saw a mix of all three looks.

“Since the theme is Fatal Attraction, we have worked on the ‘opposites attract’ idea. We have mixed and matched the outfits to create stark contrasts between the lowers and uppers,” explains Neeta.

Skirts, skirts and more skirts dominated the line, in a wide array of innovative cuts. Short, knee-length, flowing, bubble, pleated? the variety was wide and impressive. These were teamed with short jackets, boleros and body-hugging tops. Then there were some long dresses too.

Hand-paint being the designer’s forte, brushstrokes were the primary focus, with touches of embroidery, Swarovski crystals, beads and sequins.

Georgettes, crepes, nets, velvets, lycra and satins shaped the garments. “The speciality of this collection is that we haven’t taken any fabric from the market. All the fabrics have been developed by us. We created the base with hand-paint and then used surface ornamentation,” adds the Delhi-based designer.

Editing the collection to suit the nightclub mood, Neeta put up an impressive line. The only let down was the slightly amateurish choreography by Meenu and Meetu. But the super professional models made up for that too.

Spotted in the crowd was actress Raima Sen in a plunging black top paired with a white Monapali skirt.

Voiceover: “The concept of Fashion Police is to track what’s happening in fashion around us and to take Calcutta fashion to a different level. We have shows by designers Mandira Wirk, Ritu Kumar, Rahul Khanna and Rohit Gandhi, and Raghavendra Rathore lined up for the next few months,” said Salmoli Mukerji, director, public relations, of The Park.