October 20, 2022 |
Ashish Gupta has always been weary of looking to his Indian heritage to inform his work. “There was a lot of gatekeeping happening in fashion for a solid 10 years,” the designer tells me over coffee in his East London studio. “When I started, I stayed away from a lot of references that I knew just because I felt that it would stereotype me very quickly.” Throughout his 20 years in fashion, Gupta has always loyally shown during London Fashion Week. Though, when Covid came crashing, moving to illustrating his collections via lookbooks has turned out to be winning formula for both himself and his trusted slew of store buyers.
Without the pressure of a huge show has also allowed Gupta to work with photographers he’s admired from afar, like young Indian talent Ashish Shah. After finishing his collection with his factory in New Dehli earlier this summer, Gupta travelled with Shah three hours outside the city to capture this season’s outing.
A big stack of Bollywood magazines from the 1970s and ’80s that Gupta has been collecting over the years fed directly into the collection. “There was a whole slew of them, and they would be called things like Stardust,” says the designer. “It was interesting because you couldn’t show sex, you couldn’t even show two people kissing. It was all about these hidden codes.” A scene in Silsila (1981), which sees young lovers frolic through a tulip field in Amsterdam, was another key inspiration – with Gupta’s design lexicon seemingly now at its most hedonistic.
The collection includes a T-shirt dress sketched with a playful, childlike depiction of a monsoon. Elswhere, there’s a liquid-y slick evening gown emblazoned in mandras check, sleeveless jumpers frosted with sequins and Gupta’s version of a minty-fresh prom dress. A twinset inspired by Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles also proves a highlight.
“The collection felt like a continuation of last season, but I just took the whole thing and plonked it in India, and shot in India, with a full Indian team,” says Gupta. “It was like going full circle, in a way.”
Photography by Ashish Shah.
