Fashion designer Suneet Varma looks back over two decades of a working life with Kishore Singh
This ability, to combine so many worlds, to take oneself seriously while dealing with what anthropologists label the most superficial traits of society — even though it keeps cash registers ringing — is part of the complex layering of a fashion designer’s world which itself is never removed from both the profound and the profane. Here reality collides, the drama of the ramp with its impossible perfection of textile and lace and sequins and embroideries with the impossibly cramped, poorly-lit, fetid world of those who have worked on these garments, of models under the arc lights who keep punishing schedules and do rigorous workouts to appear like divas.
It is of this world that Varma might be the first citizen. In the nineties, he claimed the top dog position as poster boy of the fashion world for himself. “I’d come from Europe,” he says, “I looked fine” — and now he’s being modest for at that time he could have been his own muse, or model — “I did fashion.” He was Delhi’s toast sooner than you could say cheers, and in an emerging celebrity culture, he occupied cult status, though as yet there was little to show for it.
But what there was to show, and thereafter, is now on view in the form of two decades of Varma’s world of fashion — the earliest shoots and the themes of his collections showcased as a set of thirty-four photographs shot by Prabuddha Dasgupta, Ashok Salian, Bharat Sikka and Tarun Khiwal, featuring models Shyamolie Verma, Mehr Jesia, Madhu Sapre and in one aberration, Milind Soman. There’s more recent stuff too, fresher models, newer photographers, but we’re having our coffee over a mostly nostalgic conversation where, for the moment, there’s very little room for the present.
Was it a fulfilled part of his life, those early years of the Indian fashion industry with its marquee status, its own sub-sect of high life and glamour? There was a lot of air-kissing and being wooed by socialites and late-night parties, Varma remembers. “I was driving back once from a farmhouse and right there, in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, I stopped my car and started to cry,” and I’m horrified to think that I have no words of comfort to offer. “There was no one I enjoyed talking with, everything and everyone was so vacuous.”
Some of the zest and enthusiasm seems to have seeped out of him in his forties. The eyes are still bright, he’s still enthusiastic about his shows, but you can’t help feeling he’s paying lip-service to his craft now, the words trip out and about off the tongue of a practiced storyteller. So it’s no surprise that Varma says he’s a person alone, if not exactly lonely or reclusive. “In the last year,” he says, “I’ve only, maybe, had two friends who have come home. Others, I meet outside, at a restaurant perhaps. Some people like to hang around you, but I don’t enjoy that.”
His life then isn’t all that different from yours or mine. “I have the serious traits of a workaholic,” he confesses, when I ask him, hoping he’ll at least deny it, “but unless I’m doing work that inspires me, I’m depressed.” Nor is he happy when he’s not working on a collection, or writing — at one stage, he used to critique shows for the media, but he hardly does that any more — or filming. “Usually,” he says, “I get home at 7:30 or 8:00, and then I have my laptop, my TV, my books.” He does other ordinary stuff too, hanging out at bookstores, shopping at Khan Market, going to a multiplex for a Sunday movie, and when he’s had enough of being by himself, “I go off to Dubai to see my brother and his kids, or to Calcutta to be with my sister and her kids”, or spends time with his mother in Delhi. “Life,” he muses, “isn’t fabulous all the time.”
Strangely, he isn’t friends with the fashion fraternity. Civil, yes, polite even, but he’s unlikely to share a meal or a movie with them, and part of the reason might well be his aversion to the fashion weeks, preferring, instead, his own standalone shows, and participation in the couture week. “My work defines my life,” he agrees, surprisingly — other than his women’s wear, he’s been brand ambassador for BMW, for whom he’s combined a love of automobiles with fashion, was a vendor for New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and now also designs for Judith Leiber — and though he was involved for a while with the shirtmaker Tuscan Verve, the company got sold, but at around the same time he met Hrithik Roshan at a party who insisted that Varma design his outfits for him in his forthcoming film Kites. In spite of that, he doesn’t want to get into the menswear space. “I don’t have the infrastructure for it,” he says.
Later, at his store, he’s less designer, more shopkeeper. “We do our own lace,” he pulls dresses off the rack, “look at the appliqué work, see the sequins, we’ve done these on our own” — cut their own sequins, he means — “nobody in this country will ever buy a saree without first checking with me.” A string of names follows: socialites, fashionistas, fat cat industrialists’ wives, women who still wear the saree in an age when most celebrity moments are being designed for gowns, but Varma argues that the saree will never become obsolete. “I make it sheer” — using net, a piece of fabric that has no character, I toss back at him — “I make it sexy, naughty, fun” — but young celebrities are no longer wearing it, I insist – “I make it glamorous,” he will brook no argument, “there’s nothing as beautiful as a saree.”
In the last few years, thanks to the sealings and demolitions, he had to shut down stores and a large factory resulting in, he says, huge financial losses, but it’s not something he likes to dwell on. “I live for the moment,” he tells me now, “so when we’re having this conversation, I’ll remember it exactly later, I’ll remember what you were wearing” — which is just a little creepy — “I’m focused on this present, not on the next meeting, the next hour, the future. And I make sure it will be happy so that so that when it becomes the past” — turning to look at the pictures we’ve been walking around as a mark of his twenty-year-old journey — “I can say my past was always perfect.”
He forgot lonely.