Movement, form and a certain free spirit define Satya Paul’s latest line, Kaleidoscope. The colour palette, the brand describes, draws “from the breath of summer”. Full of sunny memories. David Abraham, one half of designer duo Abraham & Thakore, who are also the creative directors for the legacy brand, chatted with t2 on the inspirations and the mood it evokes.
Kaleidoscope looks packed with memories. It reminds one of summer, beach getaways and childhood memories. What kind of memories stirred in you when you were drawing up the mood board?
You’ve answered your question (laughs)! It’s much the same, exactly. I mean, it’s really about looking back at holidays, which were leisurely, and maybe on the beach or... you’re really living with nature and you can sort of create fantasies and images of colour.
You know how it is when you lie back in the sun, and after a while you close your eyes and the colours diffuse and you start getting these forms. I don’t know the correct term for it, but you know what I’m talking about. So that, in a sense, creates its own kind of colour palette. And to me, that’s very evocative of a particular mood. And then, of course, using the term “kaleidoscope” is also connected to that, because you hold a kaleidoscope up for five minutes, and then you keep turning it around, and all these things shift. So it’s sort of connected with that.
There’s a sense of freedom in how you visualised the campaign shoot...
That is the Satya Paul woman... modern, confident, and also very free. So we were trying to get that feeling. We don’t do only saris now, we do a lot of ready-to-wear. It captures that mood, you know, and also takes us into, maybe, the resort space. You’re looking at it as something that you can wear when you’re on holiday somewhere, some exotic place.
Also, the treatment is a lot like a canvas...
Yeah. Satya Paul is synonymous with colours, but what we’re trying to do is also trying to link it with, say, abstract and modern art. So, you get these large planes of colour, which sort of move from one to another, and create, and also maintain a certain translucence, so it never gets heavy. And yet, at the same time, there’s a lot of colour and playing with the proportion between the different colours. That’s a very important part of the mood board.
And also, when we look at all the print direction, it is to make sure that you treat every piece — whether it’s a sari or a garment — almost like a canvas. Because if you look at every garment, you realise that every part has a different design. The two sleeves are different sometimes. The colour will be different from the body, the back. If you deconstruct the garment, you’ll see that every piece, every part of the garment has a different treatment of the same print. But it’s engineered into each part. It’s actually a very complex process.
What has been your realisation about the brand in the last year that you have been the creative directors?
We’ve been very pleased by the success of the collections, and it has been very well received. And I think in some ways, we’ve been trying very much to evoke the core values of the brand, as they were when the brand was launched, 40-odd years ago, I think, by Mr Satya Paul, which was really about modernity. He was really looking at modern textiles for the Indian woman. I think that’s the essence of what we’re also trying to maintain and bring back to or come back to.
As creative people, do you struggle to create when something as unprecedented as the shared crisis we are living in hits hard?
It’s a very hard time, you are right. It is a particularly difficult time. You know, actually, it’s (art and design) a form of escape. We go into a space where we look at colour and form and beauty, and we’re playing with that. And in a sense, that really helps you to get through a difficult time. It’s not so much that it sort of suppresses it. And I think we’re very privileged to have that luxury. To be able to escape into this world. You know, you escape into this world, and everything else seems very bleak.
Anything new that you’re learning right now?
It’s an ongoing process. I’m always challenged by a new idea or a new thought, some development in some area, and I tend to dabble in all those things. Actually, what I’m really teaching myself to do, and this is not something new, I’m teaching myself something old, actually, right now. It’s a discipline to sit down and read a book, not on the screen, not on the tablet, not on Kindle, but to go back to an actual book. And I started going back to bookshops, which has really been the most extraordinary thing in the past few months. And buying physical books and sitting and reading them and finding myself reading them late into the night. So that’s a rediscovery of a very old skill. So that’s actually what occupies me, and I’m enjoying it totally. And also the texture, the physicality of it, the texture of the paper. I mean, there’s something about a new book, the smell of a new book. It’s very reassuring, and it’s also nice because you do have access to the more contemporary digital space, but you also have this. And it’s nice to be able to straddle the two worlds.
What’s happening with your brand, A&T?
Well, just a new season, developing the mood boards, the colours for Spring ’26, and fabric. This is the time of the year when we start looking at fabric development. And so then it’s looking at the theme and putting together mood boards, looking at swatches, and then thinking about what we can do with that. We start always with the weavers, because every collection starts with the fabrics, so that’s very important, like the ikat weavers or the Maheshwar weavers and see what we can do with them.