There’s so much to British creativity. Ashish Gupta entrusted the art direction of this look book to former Fashion East-ers James Theseus Buck and Luke Brooks of Rottingdean Bazaar, along with photographer Annie Collinge. This is the same trio that won this year’s Grammy for best recording package.
Gupta explained that after enduring some gut-wrenching business turbulence following the demise of Matches Fashion, he decided to leave London for India, where his family and factories are based, and cloister himself in design. “It was very therapeutic, actually,” he said. “Because making the clothes is the best part of this for me. And the workshop in India was like an ideas lab: We tried something new every day.”
Revived, he returned to England with this collection: “And trying all these new techniques made me think of the power of audacity, experimentation, and lightness. These are the same attributes that I think you need to survive as an independent in this industry, especially in the UK right now. So that’s why I wanted some lightness in this shoot.” Hence his commission.
That lightness absolutely carried over into a humorous and subversively self-interrogating lookbook that ingeniously centered around a mannequin the artists had bought on eBay. They said: “We thought about the most functional aspects and purposes of lookbooks and how we could experiment with and emphasize those.” With their trademark mordant wit they placed their obviously lifeless model in locales that served to ingeniously and incongruously mirror Gupta’s gorgeous garments. The resulting images were full of gags: some of these were obvious, others more nuanced.
So a look shot against a colorfully lumpy Brighton climbing wall was patched with irregularly shaped scraps and swatches of hand-embroidered fabric sourced from Gupta’s own development archive: these scraps included grails he’d made when he was starting out 20 years ago. A long organza dress was embroidered with sequined flowers that became progressively droopier and more wilted across the garment; this looked as if Collinge had shot it on the appropriately overgrown grassy shoulder of a highway. Memories of struggling to complete a polka-dot project under the tutelage of swear-y legend Professor Louise Wilson had inspired Gupta to make the bias-cut chiffon T-shirt dress whose dots were all hand-drawn on the garment before being filled with sequins. This was shot against a spotted wall. “I wanted to embrace the imperfection of the process in order to showcase the analog reality of the handicraft,” he said. Enhanced by its endearingly eccentric presentation—this was all analog reality, no Photoshop—Gupta’s wit, determination, and skill was writ large in this excellent collection. If you get it, you get it.
