Lakme India Fashion Week 2003 :: Anuradha Vakil

Anuradha sees herself more as a revivalist of textile crafts than as a 'fashion designer', simply because the base of her designs are always traditional Indian textiles and in her own small ways she contributes towards their preservation.

Her label Noor came in to being four years ago, out of her passion for handlooms and now retails from Ogaan in New Delhi and Kolkata, Melange in Mumbai, Ffolio in Bangalore, Madras and Cochin and her own shop Noor in Ahmedabad.

She works mainly with hand woven natural fibre fabrics and travels extensively in her search for the unusual and beautiful. She works with master weavers and crafts people in most textile centres, which range from Kalamkari hand painters in Kalahasthi, Andhra Pradesh to Bandhani karigars in Mundra. Her designs are timeless and are very simply cut, as the focus is always on the textile, the weave, the print, the craft.

Anuradha designs for a woman who has a finely tuned sense of aesthetics, someone who is as committed and passionate about things created by hand. Predictably, she has a clientele from the fields of arts, theatre and design. Being an ardent lover of Indian classical music and kathak, she doesn't really mind her clothes being labelled 'arty'. She prefers that her clothes are worn by a selective few.

Every season, new collections are put together which are usually based on a particular textile craft. Each of these comes after months of intense travels and experiments and with sheer ingenuity of her craftsmen.

Lately, the emphasis in her work has been on using vegetable dyes in most craft traditions. With the world waking up to the environment issues, these are so much more relevant today.

E-mail: anuradha_vakil