I don't have a traditional design background, but it's inherent to me. My father was in the fabric industry, and even my grandfather and my great-grandfather were lace manufacturers.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mom and both of my grandmothers have always been into fashion, so it's been around us our whole lives.
My mum was very conscious about fashion and my dad was born into the tailoring tradition, so fashion has always been my life, although now, really, I wear the same thing - just in different weights - light and heavy cashmere in winter and cotton in summer.
I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.
The design process usually starts as a fantasy, with ideas that I dream of and visualize. These ideas become a reality by bringing various ingredients together, from the lifestyle of my bride, her age and sex appeal, to the textures of the finest fabrics and embroideries that we produce in my family factories in India.
I've been designing my own pieces for a long time. My mother's a jewelry designer, so we knew at some point we were going to do a line and dive into the fashion world.
I so often heard from women that they saw this beautiful fashion, but it didn't always work for them - whether it was cultural reasons, lifestyle reasons, body type reasons. So it seemed like in my mind there was a gap there, that women really wanted to be able to customize items to fit their needs and their tastes.
Design is a series of creative choices - it's a collaborative effort, an evolutionary process. You choose your fabrics depending upon what you want to say, then you work with mills to get those fabrics. Through the process, you realize what you want it to be.
I have to say, I grew up with fashion because my mother was a seamstress, and she had an atelier. She would cut the first pattern, and then she had people working for her. So I grew up in an atelier, watching people all around me sewing. I was fascinated.
Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.
I definitely inherited a lot of from both my grandmothers and from my mother. I wear a lot of pieces that used to belong to other people.
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