Late designer Satya Paul has crafted a legacy of illustrative prints with his eponymous label. This time the label helmed by creative director Rajesh Pratap Singh has come up with its latest collection for Autumn Winter 2022 titled New Order.
The collection is disruptive, voicing functionality over sheer beauty. It resonates with the beliefs of the Art Nouveau movement where artists rejected the imitation of medieval art and vouched to integrate art with functionality by stylising objects of everyday use. The edit manifests practicality over form with ef for tless athleisure ensembles like saris, tunics, kaftans, shirts and co-ords. Thematically, it asks one to break free from boundaries and claim their space, eventually creating a new order. We talk to Rajesh about the new collection.
How does Art Nouveau inform your design process?
New Order is inspired by the Art Nouveau movement, which was a powerful reaction to the formalism and strict categories that organised existing art institutions in the early 1900s; it emerged as a resistance. Symbolised by the curvaceous, disobedient line, the work of famous artists Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec demanded a return to nature. The movement shook things up, reminding us that we are not automated machines. We are sinuous, alive, and we deserve to be free. One of the key design motifs in the New Order is the use of artistically interpreted faces. Each face we created is the team’s collective imagination of what the world and its people would look like if there were no borders and boundaries and if the conversation flowed unhindered. Since our brand DNA is all about colour and prints, especially contemporary ones, one may see plenty of them with dynamicity. All over, the collection is a collage of references which came through these prints.
What does the edit’s name New Order mean?
New Order was and is a reaction to all that is going around—a reflection and response to the world amid the Covid-19 pandemic. It is focused on the voice of today’s youth and how they feel. It is similar to what I presume people felt when Art Nouveau came in the 1920s and then again in the late 1960s. So I think we are once again in a similar situation. Our collection is a summation of those reactions.
The collection features athleisure. Do you still feel it is a rising trend, given life is now back to normal?
I think one of the things the pandemic has taught everyone is that fashion, too, needs to be defined by comfort more than anything else. With a blurring of lines between home and the workplace, people’s ideas of what to wear and where has also changed. Athleisure is the middle point that covers you from a meeting to a trip to an evening out with friends. Moreover, comfort is at the very centre of all our designs and the same has been reflected in the edit.
How has the pandemic brought a shift in preferences of people?
The pandemic has changed each and every person and humanity as a whole. It has taught us to come closer to nature and learn from it. Human beings used to think they were invincible, but Covid-19 has changed that perception dramatically. Now, people have learnt to value life more.
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