When a Librarian Goes to a Fashion Exhibition.

I often wonder what is it about stories and fables that pulls you towards them? Storytelling and listening seem to be an essential part of the human experience.

Your earliest memory of a story may be when you were wrapped in warmth and love of your mother singing lullabies and stories and you were gently put to sleep. Fast-forward 20 years, you are in IIAD Fashion Design-L4. Yes, I am talking about the exhibition “Collected Stories - Braiding Now” that I had a chance to experience.

So, let’s recap what the exhibition was about and how it came into being.

You created a magical story out of 5 tangible or intangible elements of nature - leaf, bark, network, flow, etc. Then you visualized and depicted your story on (two-dimensional) cloth by stitching, sewing and weaving - a marriage of emotions with materials. This was Act 1. Act 2 dealt with braiding the distilled essence of your same story together with naturally occurring patterns to create a unique fabric print for a (three-dimensional) garment

This description is not satisfying because it does not throw much light on your process of creation. I got a sense of this creative process by interacting with five of you - Shikha, Nivarthi, Tanushka, Shreya and Heba. Let me walk the reader of this article through the steps of your journey.

First, you went out into nature and paid attention to what caught your fancy. The five elements that you chose were your guiding light throughout. You created a story set in a magical world, only limited by your imagination. Imagination can take you to places where logic can’t. Then you used your fashion designing skills to depict that story on cloth. That’s how you became a cantador, a storyteller.

In Act 2, you had to create a fabric print for a bodice (an article of clothing covering the torso from the neck to the waist). Where did you start - none other than the tangible elements you had chosen! You photographed, enlarged and traced your element, say a leaf or a petal, on a paper (abstraction) revealing all its hidden patterns, shapes and intricacies.

Then, you paid attention to that part of the leaf which caught your fancy the most - that made your heart skip a beat, that resonated with your story - and decided to take it forward. It was a journey of hit-and-trial (iterations) to translate the pattern of that part of the leaf into a fabric print. The colour palette, the size of one shape in relation to another and what impression the overall arrangement of these shapes gives - all was inspired by your story and the intangible elements of nature - flow, growth, decay, crumble, etc - that you chose to focus on.

In this way, you created a unique print out of a teeny-weeny invisible but highly intricate part of a leaf, a petal or a bark.

Once the print is ready, how does it now translate onto a three dimensional bodice. How does it change? Is something lost or gained in translation? The outcome of this is what I saw at the exhibition.

To the untrained eye, a couple of garments hanging on an exhibition stand does not inform the viewer of the creative process that went into making the garments. It is the interpretation, in this case of an ordinary leaf, hidden in plain sight, which adds to the individuality of the garment. You gave a random element in nature your own personal and special meaning. Isn’t this wonderful? This is what design is all about. When you choose a natural element, you are seeing a part of you in that element and when you create your final product, that part (of you) is looking back at you. The boundary between a creator and their creation is always blurry. The boundary between a story and a storyteller (or a cantador) is always blurry. Unlike in movies, this story does not have an end. A part of your story, your creation will always live on inside you.