This season, with VIBGYOR, péro wished to lead their customers straight to Zalipie in Poland, where the house walls are still bejewelled with traditional floral folk paintings. Designer Aneeth Arora tells me that these houses are called Malowana Chata, meaning ‘Painted Cottage’. The label’s new collection is a beautiful amalgamation of distinctive features of this folk art style, with flower patterns, distinctive brush techniques, the traditionally white background, contemporised with an alternative black background. The collection’s surface ornamentation has been developed using thread and metal elements on an array of fabrics, woven by skilled craftspeople from Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal.
A péro staple, all fabrics used in the collection are handmade locally in different parts of India. To complement the vibrant, folk-inspired floral prints, the team has used a variety of stripes, hand-woven in silk and cotton, including ‘mashru’, a traditional textile from Gujarat. Their basic cotton fabrics range from gingham checks to linen stripes, and gauze-like solid fabrics with contrast selvedge and hand-woven woolen checks and stripes from Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. Also continuing their tradition of collaborating with Afghani refugee women, the label has explored old school crochet techniques, made anew by amalgamating them with recycled fabric strips to create full garments or parts of garments.
We’re in conversation with Aneeth Arora, who tells us more about the fashion film that was released with the collection, and about the collaborators who helped VIBGYOR come to life.
What were your initial thoughts for this collection?
We’ve been doing winter collections so far, which are very monochrome and usually dark colours, but this time we set out with the thought that we wanted it to be really colourful. We wanted it to be very vibrant. Keeping these things in mind, we’ve managed to achieve it in the manner that we’ve included almost all colours on the spectrum, and hence the name of the collection, VIBGYOR. It’s just a sum total of all the colours we’ve used.
How did you end up looking at Poland for the collection?
Like I mentioned, we wanted a very vibrant winter collection this time, and every season we do a floral print which is usually inspired by a certain era of florals or some folk culture motif. While researching for this new collection, we came across these polish houses that were covered with beautiful and colourful floral patterns. Upon further research, we learnt that these houses are still being hand painted and this fascinated us, considering we’re also a label that handpaints every print for every season. So we decided to make use of this inspiration for developing our prints for this season.
Can you take us through the film for this collection. Who were the key collaborators?
So we worked with Stephan Kaye for the music. Nikhil D, who worked on the art direction, has also co-directed it with us and helped with the styling. Then there’s also Tsundue Phunkhang, who has done the video editing, and Vartika Sharma, who has worked on the graphics. We have worked with five to six collaborators, at least. to make this collection come to life.
What was your intent while coming up with the music composition?
We intended to come up with a game show sort of a setup, wherein the choreography was such that they were made to compete with each other while doing the shoot itself. So the music was also a mix of that. We’ve superimposed the drum beats with a timer running in the backdrop. Then, there’s these announcements that happen in game shows. It’s a mix of all these sounds and composed music, which has come together to create the track for the film.
Finally, what’s keeping you busy right now?
I’ve been quite caught up with the launch of the film. Since this is a world wide release, we want to make sure that everyone across the globe gets to see it. On the side, we’re also working on péro home, which is a new thing for us and has been keeping us busy as well.
Text Unnati Saini
Photography Nishant Radhakrishnan
Date 26-10-2022