Close your eyes, smell the scent of daises and forget-me-nots and just visualise. In the meadows of dreams, filled with innocence and the promise of love, the daisies bloom bright surrounded by delicate white petals like the bright sun beaming through a cloud. These flowers dance to the sounds of humming bees and singing birds… one calls to the other “love me” and the other whispers “forget-me-not”.
Ah! How sweet is the sound!
Péro’s latest Spring-Summer 2023 edit titled, Forget- Me-Not is set in the fields of flowers of the playful daisies and the shy forget-me-nots, as they unfurl, gently heralding the dawn, looking straight at the skies as it shines, kissing the sun with a sway, as each tender petal spreads its arms to welcome to a warm embrace of love. To create something so poetic, we speak to the founder and designer of Péro, Aneeth Arora to tell us more about the inspiration. “Each season, we draw inspiration from unique subjects prior to designing collections. This season, we instinctively gravitated towards daisies and forget-me-nots, two flowers that symbolise love and romance. Spring is a time for bright colours, and these flowers match the theme of yellows, whites, and blues perfectly. Their interpretation also served our collection well — this formed the basis of Spring/Summer’23 at Péro,” Aneeth says, adding, “We see each season as a chance to get inspired and create something new. Exploring endless ways of simulating daisies and forget-me-nots, this season, these flowers were made using crochet, laser cut fabrics, beadwork, stumpwork, patchwork, appliqué, cutwork, embroidery, schiffli and many other techniques. The print surfaces for the season were developed using hand painted daisies and forget-me-not bouquets tied with delicate satin ribbons as well as disintegrating bunches.”
This season, too, Péro has continued its association with Afghani refugee women to explore the old school crochet technique with a fresh take by making fully crocheted garments as opposed to delicate edgings which they have been doing for the past few seasons.
Apart from painted and printed florals, one can see hand embroidery stitches ranging from bullion to satin and French knots to create daisy fields embroidered meticulously by skilled craftspeople. Not just that, with this particular edit, Péro has worked with Mashru, a traditional textile from Gujarat. “An array of fabrics woven by our skilled craftspeople from Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal has been used to create clothes for SS’23,” Aneeth tells us. All fabrics used in the collection are hand-made locally in different parts of India. “To compliment the delicate floral prints, we used a variety of stripes hand-woven in silk and cotton in varied weights; these include Mashru, a traditional textile from Gujarat, gabardine and taffeta silks from the south of India. Mashru is an extinct fabric, its synthetic and viscose counterpart is available for use and purchase. We had to learn the technique from the local craftsmen to recreate the fabric in pure cotton and silk fabrics which we sourced from South India. Apart from these, we have our basic cotton fabrics ranging from gingham checks to linen stripes and gauze like solid fabrics with contrast selvedge and handwoven jamdanis with daisy and forget-me-not flowers, developed in close association with our weavers,” Aneeth shares.
As is noticeable and obvious, the colour palette for Forget- Me-Not is inspired by spring and the two
flowers — yellow and white from the daisies and the blue from the forget-me-nots. “We have also added a touch of green and a burst of luminous pink to enhance the softness of a rather subtle colour palette,” the designer adds.
Moving on from Forget-Me-Not, Aneeth says, “We always work almost two years in advance. We are aggressively working on a Péro home collection, which is set to be showcased in the September issue of Maison et Objet, where we showcased last season.”
Prices available on request.
At Amethyst, Royapettah.
rupam@newindianexpress.com
@rupsjain
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