As an ethical fashion label, Mimamsaa explores the intimate connections between culture and modernity that characterise the style of today's women. Helmed by Ankita Singh, an alumna of NIFT Gandhinagar, this six-year-old brand marries the rich world of handloom textiles with contemporary silhouettes. Their festive edit, Khajurgaon Collection, comes in vivid shades of red, garnet, bottle green, magenta, pale, black, navy and Aegean blues.
This time around, the designer has kept the styling of the silhouettes around the Anglo-Indian fashion essence and she drew inspiration from Turkish miniatures, Mughal architecture and the British era. "We want to cover the styling and essence of women from royal families and their homes in Uttar Pradesh. In the first year of this series, Uttar Pradesh ke Raj Gharane, we covered the colonial-era Khajurgaon Palace in Lucknow. The architecture of the building is Mughal in style, influenced by European lifestyle and constructed by local artisans with an Awadhi essence," she tells us to further explain.
As a label, Mimamsaa is known for its experiments with timeless textiles and sustainable practices and each of its collections tries to create a new trend out of the classic Indian motifs and silhouettes. "Ethnic wear is still our inherent fashion roots Mimamsaa tries to rebuild the comfort of carrying Indian clothes in a more diverse manner by styling them in a high-fashion way," says Ankita, who feels that social media has led to a boom in ethnic wear fashion among the newer generations. For the festive and wedding seasons, she predicts the prevalence of a lot of deep colours, mostly red, garnet, pale and green.
Working with an exclusive team of weavers from Varanasi, Ankita creates garments from scratch -- right from sourcing the silk threads to the final textile. "The zardosi work too is all done in-house with our team of skilled artisans from Lucknow," she mentions.
Currently, she is busy working on their upcoming SS'23 Chikan-Kari capsule collection. There are a lot of different challenges when we work with Chikan-Kari artisans, we are still in the process of design finalisation and eliminating the challenges faced while producing on a small scale. We are planning to cover just three major cities of India with that capsule collection, which will have limited availability," she says.
Price on request. On mimamsaa.com