Harri
On the first day of London Fashion Week, as the city settled into the high-velocity reality of its next few days, three dancers in latex crops and ballooning, inflatable pants ducked and wove around each other on the runway at the Old Selfridges Hotel. Guests of Harri, the label by Kerala-born, London-based designer Harikrishnan Keezhathil Surendran Pillai, watched on. Models’ hair was slick-wet, their skin glistening. And their clothes, in spite of their bulk, moved with them fluidly.
While performative stunts aren’t unexpected on runways anymore (Elena Velez had her models wrestle in mud at NYFW just last week), Pillai’s decision to incorporate performance art was shrewd. It seemed to answer the inevitable question—‘How does anyone walk in those?’—with flippant courage: ‘Forget walking. Look how they dance!’
For spring/summer 2024, Pillai embraced the inflatable silhouettes which won him notoriety but also looked beyond the expected: his collection included bursts of neon green, most notably in stage-ready dresses and skirts, and he experimented with relaxed suiting. His favourite piece, he said backstage, was the collection’s opening oyster white skirt. “I particularly like the panels that I constructed to create a new silhouette that I hadn't tried before,” he explained. It was a bold show, and he took risks. But that’s exactly what got him here, debuting his collection in London, as one of the the British Fashion Council’s lauded New Gen designers. “[The show] came to life with the support of the British Fashion Council, and my growing team of multi-talented individuals,” he said. “[It] represents my journey from Kerala to London.”
Supriya Lele
Supriya Lele has always been interested in the secrets of the sari, but this season represented an elevation of her signature drapes and folds. For her spring/summer 2024 presentation, dangerously low-slung skirts and barely-there tanks hung over one another on the runway, revealing and concealing in a finely choreographed balance. She’s always been good at the kind of sexiness that doesn’t quite meet the eye, that vanishes before you can pin it down. Part of that is to do with Lele’s mastery of draping, which she used to new effect here—her wispy, chiffon skirts came back, reinvigorated with sari-pleat reminiscent folds, or metallic, thong-style accoutrements, but there were also floaty jodhpurs, split down the side, and powdery blue, party-ready minis.
This collection, she said backstage, “is about what I’m best at, which is draping and fluidity.” Her pieces may give the illusion of insubstantiality, but Lele reassures us that there is more than meets the eye. “It doesn’t look like a lot, but there’s loads of fabric. Tonnes! Some of those skirts take six metres of fabric. It’s hard to make it look effortless.”
More than in previous collections, Lele wanted to “show something stripped back, but still elevated.” That desire shone through in a series of jumpsuits in ribbed cotton, designed to hark back to “Indian uncles” and their white tanks. In Lele’s hands, the undergarment, emblematic and nostalgic of generations of Indian men, turned into something dynamically feminine.
It wasn’t her only foray into experimentation: she also partnered with Bentley to create corsets and jackets from off-cut leather materials, which made for the gritty counterpoints to her usual delicate pieces, and tried her hand at cobwebby knits for the first time. Accessories were also new: sleek handbags hung with tiny trishulas, or tridents—the exact kind of oblique detail that Lele obsessives love. For her loyal following, which showed out in force at her Barbican show, it certainly looked like she could do no wrong.
Ashish
If, on the last day of fashion week, after being tugged this way and that over the course of the last few days, a crowd walks out of a show smiling—well, that should be considered a high accolade for any designer. Ashish Gupta, the Delhi-born designer known for his sequin–rich occasion wear, managed this feat, and it was in no small part due to the atmosphere he conjured at his joyful, exuberant show.
Guests sat in winding circle formations around a darkened space while models of many genders, ethnicities and body types sashayed and strutted and vogued their way through the crowd, their sequinned dresses and glittering jumpsuits catching the light. What was their brief? “Oh, just everything,” Gupta said backstage after the show. “Fantasy, dreams, sex, gorgeousness, sexpots! I wanted it to be a burst of joyful, sex-positive, body-positive celebration.”
For his collection, the ever-subversive Gupta was inspired by elements of disco, Studio 54 and Asha Puthli—who was herself sitting front row—an Indian singer turned New York City disco queen. When creating, he meditated on “the power of dreams” in the context of a world where “reality right now is not the nicest.” “Surrealism is so important right now, being able to imagine,” he said. But that idea also had many meanings. This show represented Gupta’s first since the landmark retrospective of his work opened at the William Morris Gallery in April, and his first runway show in three years—so the very event, for him, was also somewhat of “a dream come true.”
Ahluwalia
Unexpectedly, Priya Ahluwalia looked to the Overlooked section of the New York Times to inspire her latest collection. The British designer with Nigerian and Indian roots was intrigued by the retrospective obituaries of notable figures who weren’t acknowledged by the publication at the time of their passing—suffice to say, that includes a lot of women and artists of colour. She became engrossed in the work of Baya Mahieddine, an Algerian artist who influenced Picasso’s work. “You can really see the impact she made on his style,” she told British Vogue. “So I started to think about other women, people from the Global South and LBGTQ+ people who have played an important part in historic movements, art and music.” Fittingly, her collection was titled ‘Acknowledgements.”
At her eponymous label, Ahluwalia has often experimented with clashing colours and bold prints—and she made no regressions this season. Adowa Aboah modelled a two piece in scarlet florals to open the show; spliced print polos sat atop blue palm tree-emblazoned shorts, and blooming nature covered intarsia cardigans. The concept of illusion and reflection shone through in her work too—she dotted tiny mirrors over evening gowns and printed knitwear with deceptive trompe l’oleil, which change colour and shape when looked at askew. “I wanted things to look one way from a distance, and then another when you’re near,” she said. As she moves from strength to strength (she was recently signed as a director at Black Dog, Ridley Scott’s studio; she is designing costumes with artist Shezad Dawood), one thing is clear: Ahluwalia is seeing things clearly.
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