With the Lakme Fashion Week x FDCI coming up next month, here's a look at the impressive work of this year's INIFD Presents GenNext winners, Arnav Malhotra, Sonam Khetan and Prasoon Sharma. The designers also share with us the fashion forecast for the upcoming winter season for you to get ready to step out in style.
Prasoon Sharma, Triune
Prasoon’s winning edit Bivouac is the portal to nature and captures the essence of an untouched wilderness that resonates with beauty, purity, and an authenticity that's often absent in our human-made environments. He has used patterns that are discovered in dense, verdant forests – a tapestry woven with earthy greens, natural browns, lively bursts of colour, and captivating animal motifs and prints.
They have employed hand braiding and hand nesting on the garments using Dori work to get the texture of nature's rawness. “We have also used a very special and innovative technique for our denim -- we have draped cotton dories around the denim, hand dyed them and got them stonewashed to lend a natural look inspired by the prop roots of the Banyan tree.
Screen prints of animal and plant motifs form an essential part of the collection that’s done on fabrics like tencel dobby, ecru denim twill, TNT khadi, and cactus textured handwoven cotton.
Winter trends for men's fashion: It is all about comfort and relaxation. Earthy Tones like warm browns, deep greens, and shades of grey will dominate autumn and winter wardrobes. Silhouettes include loose trousers, cosy fits and clogs.
Must-have winter garments: Quilted jackets, trench jackets and handloom shirts, boots balaclava and sunglasses.
Sonam Khetan (Sonam Khetan)
Sonam Khetan’s winning collection is all about sound, silence and vibration. The contemporary, feminine, and bold edit emphasizes on surface manipulations, flexible wearability, and hand embroideries and the colors are inspired by the works of Swiss artist Miriam Cahn.
“Just like there are landscapes, the world is made up of soundscapes. All the sounds in our lives form a mesh of relationships that constitute an ecology - the sound of passing breeze that indicates weather change, the first bird songs of spring, the shifting tide. All these listening experiences connect us back to the land. In this collection, I am celebrating both sound - the joyful vibration of life - and silence, which is the land speaking. Sound is what connects us all. The whole project of my brand is about connectedness - connecting with ecology, with people, with ourselves,” says Sonam.
Must-have winter garments: A beautiful, well-made turtle-neck sweater and any of our dynamic pantsuit.
Arnav Malhotra: No Grey Area
Chennai-based designer Arnav Malhotra’s collection Inconvenience today for a better tomorrow is a phrase used across construction sites of the Chennai Metro. The philosophy of inconvenience, of solving fabric waste issues at the design stage, influenced his SS’24 designs with a particular focus on zero-waste pattern making. The collection features silhouettes and fabrics inspired by the gender-neutral sari. Majority of the silhouettes that make up the collection are based on zero waste ancient Indian silhouettes like the Kalidas Kurta, Lungi and Nauvari Sari.
Arnav has reimagined a traditional Kolam print usually seen outside homes in Chennai, using a very contemporary art style with clean bold lines while retaining its traditional shape and characteristics. It’s become a brand monogram that he has used across his collection in traditional and contemporary techniques -- block prints, jacquard, digital prints, and various other applications.
“From archeological depictions of the Nauvari sari, the forefront of the inspiration for No Grey Area’s new womenswear category, to the funky-colored homes of old Madras that make up this season’s colours; the fresh edit is an amalgamation of the old and the new, east, and west meetings in the middle, and a relieving of bygone memories,” tells Arnav.
Winter trends and must-have garments: Textured fabrics and minimal workwear pieces. A versatile winder trench that can be layered up or down, pop-colour and textured hats and socks for neutral-toned jackets.
Upcoming collections: We are diving deeper into draped and directional women’s wear pieces.