Dramatic, power-packed yet deeply evocative and emotional. Huemn’s SS’26 collection that was unveiled at Mukesh Mills in Mumbai a couple of weeks back. Doused in the brand’s signature thought-provoking narrative and open to interpretation. The evening also showcased a Tata Sierra X Huemn’s limited-edition capsule collection, which saw star cricketer and World Cup-winning captain Harmanpreet Kaur walk the ramp. Pranav Kirti Misra, co-founder and creative director, Huemn, decoded the elements for t2.
Let’s talk about the new things that you explored in this collection…
The brand is in its 14th year, and over the course of time, we’ve experimented with a lot of techniques, crafts and post-pandemic, we dived into retail. We set up our e-commerce, and then we were primarily doing the business of T-shirts, denims and sweatshirts and things like that. The old adopters of the brand or the friends of the brand who’ve known the brand for the last 13-14 years, know the kind of depth that we like to dive in, in terms of craftsmanship and silhouettes, but I think the newer customer who’ve just got into the brand, since the past three-four years, probably don’t know that side of the brand. They probably identify Huemn as a brand which is catering to sweatshirts and denims, and shirts. So as a team, we were motivated and encouraged to show that side of our identity to that customer.
And at the same time, you know, fashion is a little bit cyclic in nature. So, if you see too much of something for a very long time, you also kind of get bored with it. So, I think so much of what we did came out of that principle itself, that as creative people, we’re always hungry to kind of reinvent the wheel.
Chikankari is special because I was born and brought up in Lucknow. My mother would embroider her own chikankari saris. And my father would wear fine chikankari on his kurtas during festivals. And obviously, like in our neighbourhood also during Eid and festivals like that, you would see a lot more chikankari than you would see in other cities. That did have a kind of memory and a background.
But as (Rainer Maria) Rilke, who’s one of my greatest heroes of poetry, rightly said in one of his phrases, that memories alone are not enough. After a certain point, you need to be able to forget them, till a point where they almost become a part of your bloodstream, your own identity. And then it resurfaces in its own time in your work.
We did not sit down on the drawing table, that okay, we’re going to make something with chikankari. We never work as a design team like that. It organically flew into the work, and that is why it kind of came into a new shape where we put that into woollen suits, denims, much coarser and thicker fabrics, a lot more challenging than putting on mulmul. But obviously, it’s pleasing to a creative eye to look at that because it’s something refreshing to participate in.
The saris have become a rage….
I’ve seen women in my family wear saris all the time. And as a designer, it’s almost like a juvenile hunger to also be able to make something which your mother would appreciate at the end of the day.
We’ve made saris back in the day, which were a little sporty in nature because the brand was primarily in that category. Then came the pandemic. After the pandemic, I was sitting with the sari in front of me, and I was like, why has nobody ever tried to make the silhouette symmetrical? You either will have a sari pallu on the left or the right, or the way you drape it, but it’s never a symmetrical garment. I think that is the quest that led us to make our first double pallu sari, which is a pre-stitched sari, and we paired it with a gloved blouse, and it was adopted really well, and we retailed it. It is a cool statement that you make when you wear that.
It is so edgy in nature that women have to find a particular event for them to actually wear it. I found that still women can’t wear that to a Mehndi and things like that. My go-to principle when I’m designing is to solve a customer’s problem. And then I started having a dialogue with friends around me who are women about what is lacking and how we can reinvent. They all mentioned that it needs a sexy blouse. We’ve kind of come up with the same silhouette with the blouse.
When I was sitting with that sari, I was like why is the blouse even required? So that is where we have come up with a brilliant silhouette where the blouse is completely removed. It’s a one-stitch sari where you do not need a blouse. You literally wear it in under 50 seconds, and you’re good to go. (For) women who are not since childhood wearing that silhouette and still want to participate in a sari dialogue and still want to retain the femininity and the charm of a sari… we’ve retained all the design elements of the sari.
Talking about the hair and make-up at the show, did you want to portray violence?
As an artist, I like to take part in realism, something that is far removed from the drama of making things better than they are. I like to present something which is raw. I like to participate in something which is real, even if it’s ugly. As long as it’s real, it’s beautiful for me. And I feel like everything that life throws at you is some sort of a resource or ingredient for a creative person to draw from, violence being one of those factors.
It’s so organically present all around. I was driving, and the violence of the honking of the vehicles around you or just the violence of going through a busy area in a street and people just like jumping and trying to cross you. So, you know, all that is also extreme violence, like the violence of the pollution that I’m living in right now in Delhi, the mud and the construction, everything that has also come into my work in the last year. Every time I work with that texture, within me, it’s nothing negative. I shy away from telling what it makes me feel because it makes me feel entirely different, and I know that it might make somebody else feel entirely different.
So much is going on in the world, to a certain level, I also question the role of fashion and the position of fashion. How can something be extremely pretty on the ramp when there’s so much going on in the world?
What did Harmanpreet Kaur mean to you when you chose her to walk the ramp?
I mean, it’s a collective choice of Tata Sierra and Huemn. Harmanpreet Kaur is now a part of history where her name is going to be in school books for the next 300, 400 years. The first woman to get a World Cup for India. I would not leave an opportunity like that to be a small part of her life, you know, when you’re talking about somebody who’s going to be remembered in history. She is also a torchbearer for so many young girls and women... kind of opens doors to a new industry.
We’ve been very mindful of taking the right ingredients from the Tata Sierra world and incorporating those in the three products that we are dropping together — a cap, a T-shirt and a jacket. Harmanpreet was wearing the jacket.
Are you writing something? Share something with us.
I mean, yeah, I keep writing, but nothing great. As a writer, you need to sit at the table every day to kind of keep your pen alive. I’ve been writing a book now, that also started in 2020, but that’s far from being completed. That one is partly autobiographical fiction, but more so with respect to the psychological nature of human beings. But otherwise, I write poetry. But obviously, I mean, you can only try to write poetry. I was telling someone the other day that nobody matters and nothing matters, including you. So do not take anything so seriously. But yeah, to that effect, I always say har insaan aapke zindagi se ek waqt ke baad chala jaata hai, phir chahe woh marke ho ya darke ya phir jee bhar ke.