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METROSCAPE
The
Nifty Ways
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| Vegetable colours: Shubhangini dresses up |
Don't invite this
girl to dinner. When Shubhangini Singh saw the unglamorous tori (sponge
gourd) at a vegetable stall, she didn't think "great culinary potential",
she thought "great design possibility" instead. The result:
a veggie bustier worn with a skirt of discarded bandhini threads. The
outfit was one of five that won her a Best Design Collection Award at
Confluence 2001, a contest of graduating students from all seven branches
of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in India. "I
don't believe in using just fabrics to make clothes, I like to think of
new ways and new fabrics," says Shubhangini. It figures.
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| Imagination Takes
Wings: Malhotra and his butterfly design |
The 22-year-old Delhi NIFT-ian wasn't the only
one at the show with a bizarre-but-winning imagination. She shared the
award with wacko batchmates Seema Singh and Manik Malhotra. Seema, 27,
from NIFT Mumbai, got pulses racing with a seemingly topless model on
stage... It was only Carol Gracias in a flesh-coloured blouse which had
been draped on a mannequin, then sprayed with paint to take on the contoured
shades of the female body. "My collection is based on perception,"
says the designer, "because what you perceive is not what it is,
what it is not what you perceive." Delhi's Malhotra, depicting a
butterfly emerging from its coocoon, even had a gown with wings which
when dropped turned into a train.
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| Art Of Perceiving:
Gracias in Seema's outfit |
Shubhangini, Seema and Malhotra want to launch
their own labels some day. And whatever cynics may say about fashion being
the fad among professions, truth is, it isn't easy to get where these
three are. Seema, a post-graduate in Botany almost didn't become a designer
because of family disapproval. And Malhotra's father wanted him to join
the family auto spare parts business. Thrilling prospect? He didn't think
so. And look where it's got him.
-Anna M.M. Vetticad
 STAGE
FRIGHT: Shots pierce the air as the victim
collapses on the floor ... not exactly a fluffy comic supper theatre kind
of evening. Ben Elton's ferocious play Popcorn, performed last week at
the NCPA, Mumbai, by a group of Bangalore actors, is the story of mass
murderers reminiscent of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers without the
drunken camera shakes and dislocated music video editing. With witty and
sexually explicit dialogues and a seduction scene by playboy model Brooke
Daniels (Harathi Reddy) the play, directed by actor Ajit Saldanha, dealt
with the question of whether filmmakers glamorise violence or it simply
reflects society. But Mumbai audiences failed to show up.
"I am interested in exciting theatre,"
said Saldanha perhaps suggesting that Mumbai was more prudish than Bangalore.
Daylight murders, hijacking and media frenzy seemed to have hit too close
to home.
-Himanshi
Dhawan
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