Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Photograph © Paroma Mukherjee
Backstage, at the fashion week in Delhi, some years ago, I heard a choreographer tell the models to walk properly and not sway like in a "Bappi Lahiri song." Lahiri is a music director in India's Bollywood, who was disco's pin-up boy in the 1980s and '90s. His bling quotient was impeccable, and the long gold chains he wore on his neck are iconic even today. What he did, though, while making music in the mainstream, was to incorporate a visual aesthetic that drew from not the elite, but was adorned by cinema's highest paid actors at the time.
I attended a couple of fashion weeks in Delhi to witness and document color and its relationship with the temporary, built space of the event. It felt like being in a film, where colors become stories and documents that reveal stories when the spotlight is forced on them. Many inequalities come together at events as high profile as this - and those, to me, seemed to be hidden in the mainstream perception of it all. The fleeting comment by the choreographer actually summed up what is expected of fashion weeks - a certain idea of perfection and elegance that could not possibly come from the masses, yet the people who put together the event did not belong to the elite, and weren't really part of its public face. They consumed a very different experience of the event altogether, and their spaces of occupation (though the other side of the stage) were devoid of glamour and yet embraced a strong palette of color that drew me to them. One can call this work an observation of color spots, of inequalities, of a certain kind of flânerie, or all of the above. In its elements, it affiliates itself to Lahiri's music, knowing very well what it must keep its distance.
20 November
