“It was just three of us, Sumeet Varma, Ritu Kumar and I,” recalls designer Niki Mahajan just ahead of her highly anticipated showcase at Bangalore Fashion Week's Silver Jubilee Edition, held at The Ottera, last weekend.
Known for her intricate embroideries and luxurious silhouettes that fuse contemporary elements with Indian aesthetics, Niki pioneered the Indo-Western style even before it was a concrete concept. However, it is her conviction about changing the country’s fashion landscape at a time when being a designer was not a popular career pursuit, that truly captivates you.
Almost instantly you realise that you are chatting with a woman who had her first fashion show in 1993 and she’s still going strong with her signature flowy, anti-fit ensembles. So much so that now her brand is undergoing a revamp, something she’s extremely excited about.
Niki shares “we are doing a complete changeover in the brand. We have developed software where we can take a fragment of an embroidery or a textile from years ago and reproduce it. That’s what we are going to be focusing on now. We are going to be taking cultures across the world, understanding their fashion and reproducing fragments with rich cultural significance.”
“All my collections, from here on, are going to be called Wandering Nomad. Like last time ‘Wandering Nomad’ went to Vietnam and in the new collection, ‘Wandering Nomad’ will experience Uzbekistan. I am travelling to Central Asia to do proper research in April,” she adds.
Niki has all the notes you need on fashion. You just need to ask the right questions and that’s exactly what we did. Using our little time with Niki to the fullest, we started by asking what fashion trends she thinks will take over in the summer of 2024.
She enthuses, “comfort fits, anti-fits, the colour white and minimalism will take over. Even though the trend colour of the year is peach, I feel white will dominate, especially in tropical weather, now on in Bengaluru.”
10,000 onwards. Available from mid-March.
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