It's about design, not fashion

Madhu Jain and Milind Soman are collaborating on innovating trends for Indian textiles, including Kashmiri embroidery.

In Lutyens’ Delhi, surrounded by art and artifacts, the daughter of businessman Kamal Meattle is photographing model-turned-entrepreneur Milind Soman for a collection of textile-driven garments that Soman and designer Madhu Jain are launching. At a time when launches, fashion events and weeks are choking the city’s social life, the announcement of their label — the banal-sounding M — stands out for its refreshing candour. Here is a fashion brand that, says Soman, “is not a fashion label but a design label”.

It isn’t all semantics because M’s collection is hardly silhouette-driven. All it has going for it is the strength of the Indian weaver and the innovations of Jain and Soman behind it. For a couple of years, the duo’s “A Tribute to the Masters” collection has only been shown on the ramp; now, for the first time, it is available for sale on racks at Ensemble in New Delhi’s tony DLF Emporio.

Jain is agitating over several things — the kalamkari t-shirts haven’t arrived yet, Soman wants to go running instead of talking to hacks, and she has to, well, wash her hair. Soman, who flew in the previous night from London, is red-eyed from lack of sleep, but is gung-ho about “globalising and popularising Indian textiles with great innovation and style”. In other words, “We are innovating the textiles, but someone else needs to interpret them into garments.”

Soman, once a keen collector of textiles, particularly embroideries, was concerned that though government outfits did their bit to promote textiles, there was inevitably no follow-up. “We” — that’s Jain and him — “wanted to set up a marketing module, to innovate with traditional weavers, to interpret usage.”

For Jain, who works closely with weavers because of her own Madhu Jain fashion label, it has meant experimenting with cotton and tussar, or silk, wool and ikat, or kantha, kalamkari and ikat together. The launch of M on the racks of Ensemble, she says, is an attempt to see how they will go about with their own M stores, but more importantly, she insists, “Money is not the issue, the cause is.”

While the current collection has sarees and dupattas woven in the form of Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings, there are kalamkari renditions of pahari miniatures, and upada weaves using animal figures in a contemporary rendition. Interestingly, the two have been working and hope to soon introduce their interventions in the textile traditions of Kashmir. “The young of Kashmir want to do something,” says Jain, “and we want to be a bridge between couture and craft — initially with textiles, and later with all lifestyle products.”

What they’ve managed is to develop the popular Kashmiri chain-stitch to make it more high-end on Dhaka muslin layered with mulberry silk from West Bengal, and then do the naqsh or base stitch of kantha with the Kashmiri chain-stitch. “We then have a new entity in hand,” says a smug Jain. This will be launched in 2009.

“What we need is to convert 16-35-year-olds to Indian textiles, and to be proud of it,” winds up Soman, “and though we have the textiles, we need to have the styling and cut for them.”