Just when you thought he must have run out of tricks, Sabyasachi Mukherjee pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Who knew that the new style of the man who had been busy perfecting classic couture with an essentially Indian soul would be defined by the words ‘bra’ and ‘bling’?

As the clock struck 9.30pm and Vidya Balan was prettily front-rowed in a Sabya cotton, the sound of Frida’s Paloma Negra filled the main show area for the last show of Day One of Lakme Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2010 in Mumbai’s Grand Hyatt.

Jyothsna Chakravarthy walked in wearing skirt and top, both block-printed net. Totally transparent. The zardozi, buttons and cowry shells made no attempt to serve as placement embroidery. What was there was for everyone to see — sexy strapless black bra and unsexy matronly panties. Surprise!

The next 35-odd garments that appeared on the red khadi runway revealed a lot — both literally and figuratively. The designer made the audience travel right from casual New York to couture France with a long halt in exotic Africa. It was all curry, mix and match. Baroque met art nouveau. Five-hundred count khadi met 100 per cent synthetic net. Floral prints met Urdu fonts. Shiny sequins met Swarovski so sparkly that even Delhi designers will feel threatened. Obviously, there were borders too — but of a different kind. Let us call them hardware borders, for what else can you call embroidery with safety pins, trouser clasps and hooks “burnt and tortured” (in Sabya’s words) and dumped together. And then sometimes the hardware border became a hardware bra.

Bib necklaces hung lower to become bib yokes, and more cowry shells chimed.

There was a trench coat. There were some paisley bell-bottoms. There were printed draped tops, cord-worked waistcoats and the return of the skirt. Maxis maxed out. The backs dipped dangerously low. But instead of a tail-bone teaser, what peeked out was the black waistband of underwear. A little higher and you saw that Sabya’s models were wearing thick-strapped bras — and couldn’t help wondering why. The designer later dismissed the show of lingerie as “mid-life crisis”, and not a nod to the major international trend. The silhouettes were far from stereotypical — all effective on the ramp but for the rack they would call for more than a tweak.

A final word for Sabya’s styling: printed headscarves, messy hair, hardly-there make-up, hand-embroidered kitschy platform shoes, meenakari jewellery, black nail varnish, cloth bangles and rose-tinted eyeglasses. As Sabya put it, “Perhaps I needed a new perspective.”

Shradha Agarwal
Pictures by Pabitra Das