Such edifices that you build, and not want to live in, and leave, then define abandonment and resurrection. It is an absurd statement. But in the anachronism of it lie the stories of survival.
Abandonment is a verb. It is movement. It is universal and particular.
You see a man walk down the alley dressed in a shirt culled out from a sack. You watch him walk with abandon, and in perfect harmony with the absence and the presence.
For so long that I have watched the streets - Philadelphia to Delhi - I have seen the children learning foraging for food, learning to fend for themselves, fighting addictions, embracing it, doing whatever works … You "come up hard."
That means you harness every inner resource in order to survive. It returns you to the primeval instinct.
It is the experience of that survival and the response that inspires this collection, which derives its meaning from the streets, and from an observation of lives - mine, and others.
There’s hope in incomplete. There’s scope in deconstruction.
Emotional and physical. You watch the streets, and the code of it.
Such experiences, the rough edges, the splatter of paint, the broken blocks, the grime and the dust, are seared into the line. It isn't sad. It is celebratory. The world closes in, and the process of turning inwards is where you know you are all what you got. That building blocks are within. Broken things are beautiful.
The Rishta narrative is about emotions, and in the Essentials line, which breathes from the core of our philosophy, we have tried to merge stories, and experiences of the grandeur of everyday survival. It is an invocation of the street, its aggression, and transgressions in the framework for negotiating respect through appearance. The collection aims to collapse and gather, and then return to the chaos within, and the order that stems from living as abandoned.
The streets reduce us to the basics. Here, nothing ends and begins.
We have used the fabric as a canvas to treat it, to paint it, to embellish it in a way that it looks incomplete, and unbelonged. In the scattered mayhem, and in the details of it, is the story of resurrection and abandonment.
The idea of using wool, and leather was to communicate the need for self-protection, to cocoon yourself within the barriers of self so you fill in the blanks of your being.
Here’s to redefining who we are, and where we belong, to discovering a room with windows, and looking out.