There isn’t a moment when Chennai-based jewellery designer Ratika Haksar is not thinking‚ what next. Case in point, her latest collection, Azurika. The refreshingy original line may have only launched last week, but close to the unveiling of her previous collection, Reykjavik, in April last year, the designer already had a fully functional concept note for Azurika in place. Since then, Ratika sketched, re-sketched and refined what would be the final designs that would make it into the new collection.
“I’d like to believe that I have always had a creative bent of mind. The economics of things has always been secondary,” she shares, as she almost let’s slip a key detail for her forthcoming line — that it is all pink (but that’s under wraps for now). “I’m always finding new outlets for my creativity, either as doodles, paintings or jewellery,” says the popular designer who has brought out collections like Istanbul (inspired by Turkey), Botanika (inspired by nature) and Symmetrika (inspired by geometric forms) in the past.
Though inspired in part by the view that she wakes up to everyday, courtesy her beachfront home in Kovalam, Ratika reveals that a lot of the designs she visited for the collection were from doodles she sketched while in school. “I remember that many times I’d end up drawing images of a fish, which is a key motif in the collection, alongside shells, starfish and scales.”
Crafted completely in silver, a metal that she considers her niche, with the exception of a couple of pieces sporting a gold finish, Azurika features 85 pieces of which 25 are necklaces. “Finding your inspiration in nature is a cliche, but it is the treatment of it which can make a design stand out,” she says. We had our eyes on exquisite neckpieces with multi-coloured calendonia stones carved into shell motifs and are interspersed with silver starfish and oyster shells — a testimony of her design aesthetics. Working with select stones, some of which were handpicked the designer during her travels, like sapphires from Colombo, Azurika is a limited edition collection. “But, I plan to keep adding designs that include the shell and jellyfish patterns.”
Azurika starts at `7,500.