Walking in the city: how fashion designer Rahul Mishra looks at nature’s beauty, home-cooked food and time with loved ones

This will be not just another design studio, but a creative residence. It will be a picture of the living space of the experience in the surrounding landscape and soundscape. “Students can express themselves in any way they want by exploring their consciousness,” says Mishra, who believes that design as a philosophy should go into the small things in our lives and not remain confined to the runway.

Rahul Mishra as Chatta Noida Atelier, working with Karigars. (Photo: Gajendra Yadav)

In his studio, he consciously prepared a garden where he grew seasonal flowers. And in the workshop, the embroiderers make thousands of flower items. One of them used up to 150 colored silk threads on a 4×4 inch fabric to get the tone and shade of each leaf and vein. After the flower is embroidered, it is cut with a tool and placed on the fabric that is part of the bride’s dress. This is just one flower. There will be such overlays to create a 3D effect, a feature that characterizes all Mishra Couture collections in Paris or Delhi.

“As a child, I used to go through art books and marvel at the works of Van Gogh, Monet and Dali. I learned to draw and paint before I learned to write and I easily follow Monet’s famous quote, ‘I want to paint the air around the landscape.’ Since I was good at physics, my father wanted me to go to IIT. So, I ran away from home and joined the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. He paid my fees reluctantly and for a long time, telling everyone that I was a design engineer. But I was okay with it as long as I didn’t do my own thing,” says Mishra.

His collections always draw inspiration from the Himalayas. “The idea of ​​flowers and butterflies flying between them was an obsession. That seeped into my collections,” he says. Holding a trace of the finished dress, he explains how he interpreted the view from his favorite perch in Kalakhet, where he often stops on his long walks. “My flowers are the same as the real ones. And the peaks of the snow and the clouds floating above them have as profound a sight as I have seen in the distance. The dress itself takes the shape of the flower. This is where my fantasy meets fashion, where art meets imagination and breaks boundaries. It’s this purity of connection that made Mishra’s “Lotus Pond” such a hot topic at the couture show in Paris.

But the designer is not alone, he shares that with hundreds of artisans who are just as talented and passionate. Rows and rows immersed in their work, spread out on low work tables, combining their traditional ari, challah, zardozi skills with French knots on caps shipped to Japan. He was the only designer who didn’t lay off his staff during the pandemic and even doubled his business. Because he future-proofed the business long ago. “We started reverse migration in 2018. We discuss everything from design consultation, ideas, mock-ups to even logistics via teleconference and WhatsApp.

That idea also came on a walk, which he has now taken to Dharavi with his winger Afzalbhai Zariwala. “Most of the artisans are migrants and they work in these parts with wooden khat in the same room. Afzalbhai lived in Mumbai for only 20 years. He sent 90 percent of his income back to his family home. He and his friends would sleep on the factory floor and eat vada pav to save on rent. I have seen how they have paid their entire working lives to earn a living that they will never enjoy. And the greatest empowerment is when you enjoy the fruits of your labor. Afzal’s house in the village is beautiful and spacious. Since it is a family home that will be passed down from generation to generation, there is no need to worry about rent. But with no luck, he had to head to Mumbai for his livelihood and live like a nobody. How about we get a small workshop or classroom space there? He painted the house, cleaned it, renovated his large kitchen to feed some of the hands he hired to help him. The result: they have their family around them, they can eat home-cooked meals every day and without the burden of additional expenses, they can focus more on their hands. In a village, they use bicycles, so there are no travel costs. In Dharavi they had to walk a kilometer to relieve themselves, cook their own food and waste a lot of time. Also, when the epidemic hit, it hit the big cities more than the smaller centers, so their jobs weren’t affected at all. Embroiderers like Hukum Lal can buy a laptop and we hold meetings on designs and themes every day,” says Mishra.

Thanks to this experiment, people like Afzalbhai developed their own sense of entrepreneurship and creativity to allow the team to work from their native place. “That’s how I learned that home-cooked meals, living with parents and family is not only empowering, but the only luxury. And they became the voice of my fashion,” Mishra says proudly, as he tries to move as many of his staff to their homes as possible and tour the design lab ahead of the launch of a large collection. “Happy people mean a whole new democracy of ideas,” says Mishra.

Moving past Noor, who has been with Mishra since he started his embroidery association, we find him throwing flowers with silk threads to give a 3D effect. As he creates each stem and thread, he thinks of the flowers grown in his hometown of Samastipur. Now he has his own room at Samastipur, where the fingered Shifa and Hunar are busy making lehengas based on the samples he sent them. “My lehengas are made in the villages,” says Misra proudly. It’s no surprise that he calls his latest clothing collection “The Tree of Life.”