Kolkata-based Reik is a label fast becoming popular with Gen Z. A favourite with actresses Athiya Shetty and Parineeti Chopra, the two-and-a-half year old brand is also very popular with actress Samantha Ruth Prabhu. Reik recently released their pre-Spring collection and we caught up with co-founder Deepanshu Kunwar, to talk shop, design and fashion.
Influenced by the Japanese wabi-sabi school of thought, the collection, Unhive 2.0, celebrates imperfections and beauty that stems from age. It hopes to embody experiences and emotions that are simple, impermanent and incomplete, through designs. Simple shapes evolve into organic silhouettes, featuring aged and dried botanical landscape prints in a mix of high quality silk fabrics in a rustic pre-Spring colour palette.
“The collection is a continuation of Unhive, our Autumn-Winter 2021 collection. The idea was to create a dopamine high, hoping to remove the gloom that the pandemic brought with it. The whole collection is about curated hand-finished pieces in bright colours and festive themes. It’s however a pre-Spring collection and so the colours are sober and sombre and we’ve stuck to green, blue and red in beautiful yet bleak botanicals and paisleys,” begins Deepanshu who graduated from National Institute of Fashion Technology, Bengaluru in 2015.
This collection is a transition between their Autumn-Winter 2021 collection and their latest collection, their Spring-Summer edit, simply called Collection 22. “Unhive 2.0 is our most popular collection right now but Collection 22 features a lot of ombrés, lime greens and fuschias,” the designer adds.
With asymmetric silhouettes, overlays and separates, Unhive 2.0 features pants, shirts, co-ord sets, dresses and jackets in silk, habotai, satin, organza, crêpe and cotton silk. “We really want to move away from the European hangover of obsessing with white, grey, black and beige. India is a land of colour and we love celebrating it,” concludes the designer who co-founded the label with his sister Sneha Singh — who is also a fashion graduate, but from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kolkata’s Batch of 2010.
INR 12,000 onwards. Available online, at Evoluzione in Chennai and at their store — Dhruvtara Building, 33, Tollygunge Circular Road, Kolkata.
romal@newindianexpress.com
@elromal