“I treat every season like it’s the last,” Ashish Gupta tells me over Zoom from New Delhi, a couple of weeks before his runway show, which is taking place in London’s 180 Strand today. “It’s not just fashion — in life, you just don’t know where you’ll be or what will happen. I am so lucky to be able to do what I love. I never take it for granted.”
Ashish, in particular, has proven a certain level of resilience. In fact, today’s show is a double bill: celebrating both the designer’s return to the runway after a two-year hiatus, as well as an unofficial 20th anniversary of sorts. His first London Fashion Week show took place in September 2005, though the brand was founded earlier, in 2001. The New Delhi-born, Central Saint Martins-educated designer had his portfolio stolen while searching for a job in Paris; with little other choice, he returned to the English capital and began to make bespoke clothes, until he got a phone call from Browns. “The buyer called me and said, ‘Somebody just walked in wearing one of your jumpers. Can you come in and see us? We love your collection.’ So in a way, my career has been marked by a series of bad luck/good luck coincidences,” he muses.
The most recent of those coincidences came with the collapse of online retailer Matches, for which the brand was making four collections a year. “It was quite a big financial setback, and, if you run a small, independent business, that is very destabilising and takes a while to recover from. But it also meant I had to start my own [direct-to-consumer] e-commerce platform,” he says. “I got that up and running last year. I’m a bit old school and a bit of a technophobe, so I have been avoiding doing this for many years. But better late than never.”
This is the first time Ashish is engaging his customers directly online or offline, having always opted for wholesale because of the convenience it offered. “I never wanted the responsibility in a way. But I am finding this new way of working very interesting, actually — getting to see what sells and what people love. I was also very lucky because I’ve had some really good people helping me set it up, like Natalie Kingham, who used to be at Matches. She was instrumental in encouraging me to get it off the ground,” he says.
Ashish’s collections have been traditionally loud, sparkly and humorous, or rather ironic. Standout items include a grey sweatshirt with the words “I’m Serious” emblazoned in sequins (SS13), an A-line sequined mini dress resembling a crochet blanket (AW19) and his now legendary “Immigrant” T-shirt, which the designer himself debuted on the catwalk of his AW16 show following the Brexit referendum. “You always have to have a sense of humour, no matter how shitty things get,” he tells me.
When I visit the studio four days before the show, the team is deep in the process of casting, with Ashish asking the models to brace themselves while walking, as if on their way home from a night out. “We got this 9 am slot and I was like: ‘Who wants sequins for breakfast?’ But then I thought, ‘Actually it’s like the walk of shame, isn’t it?’ Which is perfect in a way. I would love to see someone wearing a sequined dress at 9 o’clock in the morning.”
The designer decided to start his own manufacturing in India in 2002 because “I couldn’t find anyone [in the UK] to make the clothes I wanted to make. I was making things in such small quantities and everything was handmade and really heavy on time and skill.” He went back to New Delhi and set up a four-person studio, which has swelled to 50 today, some of them hand-embroidery artisans. The operation is overseen by Ashish’s mother, who used to be a GP until he convinced her to work with him.
“Gradually, that operation has grown,” he says. “It’s still very small-scale in size but it’s a really lovely way to work because I can do things in small quantities and control the process — I sign off on everything. I don’t have any extra stock ever, there’s no wastage. I don’t have embroidered fabric on rolls where I’m cutting things and throwing away unused textiles. The pattern pieces are beaded rather than the roll of fabric. Everything is just needed for the actual pattern piece. It’s almost like a couture way of working.”
He spends about six weeks in India working on each collection before the rest of the world gets to see it: “I go into a kind of trance. I don’t do anything, I don’t socialise — I just work. I like to dive into my work and try to generate an intense feeling based on what I like, what I don’t like and what I respond to. Which is a really difficult thing to do — a lot of the time you have a block and you can’t get to it. And then when it happens, it’s almost the best feeling in the world. It’s delicious.”
In another stroke of bad/good luck, the pandemic forced Ashish to stop showing on a seasonal basis, which the designer had been doing non-stop since 2005. But that opened him up to different ways of working, too — creating, for instance, incredibly clever lookbooks in order to promote his collections (his latest with multidisciplinary duo Rottingdean Bazaar being a personal highlight of mine). He says: “Not doing a show means that you can explore other ways of working. You can work with artists, photographers, directors — you become more malleable. I’ve always loved collaborating with people, so that was a really nice opportunity. Like, working with Rottingdean Bazaar; that was hysterical. When else would I get an opportunity to do something like that?”
Why do a show now? “Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I really wanted to do a show but I also wanted to make sure that it made sense creatively and also financially. There have been lots of moving parts, and it’s been a bit of a last-minute decision — but I guess things in the universe just kind of aligned to make it possible. The British Fashion Council helped us with the venue [180 Strand is the official BFC x LFW show space] and Mac [Cosmetics], who we have partnered with many times in the past, have also been very supportive.”
The tendency to look for the silver linings also permeates his work, which he builds on three central themes: glamour, (“A word that derives from the idea of casting a spell”), sequins (“Our brains are hardwired to be attracted towards shiny surfaces, because we need water for survival”) and nightlife (“I have always been fascinated about how cities light up at night and also how they provide a refuge to minority communities”).
The collection he is showing today at 180 is titled ‘Crisis of Confidence’. “This season, I am exploring ideas around uncertainty and confidence — or a crisis of confidence,” Ashish explains. “It is impossible not to reflect the uncertainties a lot of us are feeling, the chaos of our times. Social media tells us to always be strong, to look perfect and always achieve our goals. But there is a freedom in saying we are allowed to fail.”
The thing is, it’s harder to fail when you’re so good at bouncing back.
