Anamika Khanna’s AK|OK brings ‘Designed in India’ ease and modern luxury to Selfridges London

I think we have always understood luxury a little differently in India. We understand the value of time because we have grown up around things that take time. A piece of embroidery might pass through several hands before it is finished. A textile might carry a technique that has survived for generations. There is something very human about that.

But I also think India is changing very quickly, and that is equally important. We are not standing still, looking back at our heritage. We are living with it, questioning it, sometimes undoing it and putting it together again. Perhaps that is what we can offer now. Not simply craft, because craft without a point of view can become decoration. It is this tension between an extraordinary past and a very restless present. I find that much more interesting.

I don’t remember there being a single moment. AK|OK was always imagined as something that could travel. I never wanted someone to look at the clothes and immediately decide where they belonged. I wanted them to have a certain ambiguity. London Fashion Week changed something for us because suddenly the clothes were away from home. They were being looked at without all the context that surrounds us in India. People didn’t necessarily know the references or the history. They simply responded to the clothes.

There was something liberating about that. Selfridges feels like the next part of that journey. Not because we have suddenly become an international brand, but because perhaps we are becoming less concerned with defining ourselves as one thing or another.

I think they understood the contradictions in the clothes. There is India in them, of course. It would be impossible for there not to be. It is in the hand, the drape, the instinct to layer things, the way we approach a surface. But I never wanted that Indianness to become a costume we had to wear.

Selfridges has always been interesting because you can walk through it and encounter completely different worlds beside one another. Nobody is asking them to become the same thing. I liked the thought of the brand entering that space without an introduction, without having to explain itself first. The clothes could simply arrive and belong.

I think when you are younger, you imagine ease means having nothing to do. I don’t think that anymore. My life is rarely empty. There are always collections, fittings, people, decisions, things unfinished. So ease has become something much smaller and perhaps more precious. It is the absence of resistance. A morning when nothing feels forced. Sitting with a cup of coffee before everyone begins asking you questions. Walking somewhere without needing to arrive quickly. And clothes can give you a little of that. I wanted this collection to feel as though the clothes already knew you. You shouldn’t have to negotiate with them all day. You put something on, you move, you travel, you sit, you go somewhere at night. It stays with you. That, to me, is luxury now.

Perhaps I have become more interested in the clothes people keep. There are clothes you admire, and then there are clothes you somehow cannot get rid of. They become softer. They acquire marks. They begin to remember your body. I find those clothes much more moving. So I wanted this collection to have some of that feeling from the beginning. Not clothes that are so precious that you become frightened of living in them. Clothes you can layer, crush into a suitcase, wear differently the next time, forget about for a while and then discover again. I don’t know if I would call it comfort exactly. It is familiarity. And there is something very beautiful about familiarity.

I don’t think ease should mean that a garment has stopped thinking. Sometimes the most relaxed clothes require enormous discipline. A shoulder has to fall at exactly the right point. There can be too much volume by an inch and suddenly the whole thing becomes heavy. A jacket can look almost unconstructed and still have a great deal happening inside it. I like that kind of invisible work.

You shouldn’t necessarily see the architecture. You should only feel that something sits beautifully. So the tailoring in this collection has been softened, but it hasn’t disappeared. The bones are still there. They are simply quieter.

I couldn’t separate them. I liked what happened when these fabrics began speaking to one another. Linen has an honesty to it. It creases almost immediately and refuses to pretend otherwise. Cotton is something we know almost before we know clothes. Silk has movement and light. Knit has intimacy because it follows the body. None of them interested me when they felt too perfect. We washed things. We softened them. We allowed surfaces to become slightly irregular. I wanted the collection to feel as though perhaps it had already lived somewhere before you found it.

When you grow up in India, you absorb certain things without realising you are absorbing them. You understand that the hand leaves a trace. A stitch doesn’t have to be absolutely identical to the stitch beside it. A surface can be irregular and become more beautiful because of it. Fabric changes with wearing. Things are repaired rather than immediately discarded. Something old can sit beside something new without anyone finding that strange. Those ideas are somewhere inside me when I design. So I don’t need to put an obvious Indian motif onto something for it to belong to where I come from. Sometimes India is simply in the softness of a seam, the way something is draped, a raw edge that has been allowed to remain raw. I prefer when you sense it before you can name it.

People sometimes want fashion to make these distinctions much more clearly than people actually do. I have never found the boundaries particularly interesting. I like a woman in something severe. I like softness on a man. I like when somebody takes a garment that was supposedly designed to be worn one way and completely changes its meaning simply by putting it on. Perhaps the conversations around gender are different in London and Delhi or Paris and Mumbai. But the instinct is not so different. People want to recognise themselves in their clothes. And sometimes you recognise yourself most clearly in something that wasn’t supposedly made for you.

Memory, perhaps. I was thinking about what the sun does to things. India is full of extraordinary colour, but I am equally fascinated by what happens after that colour has been left outside for years. A wall that was once bright becomes chalky. Black becomes brown. Blue becomes almost grey. Fabric fades unevenly where it has been folded. Stone changes with rain and dust and heat. Those colours feel alive to me because time has participated in making them. So the chalk, stone, sand, weathered olive, washed indigo and burnt earth in the collection aren’t really colours in their newest state. They are colours after something has happened to them.

Very different. When I began, there was a fairly fixed idea of what Indian fashion was allowed to look like. It was beautiful, certainly, but it was expected to occupy a particular world: weddings, occasion, embroidery, tradition. I remember feeling quite strongly that this couldn’t possibly be the whole story. Because India isn’t one thing. It has never been one thing.

—manuvipin@newindianexpress.com

  @ManuVipin

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