Lakme Fashion Week - Preview - Gurpreet Kaur

What is a fashion week without its accessory designers? Every season, a brood of young designers adds dazzle to the couture and prêt ensembles showcased on the coveted runway. The truly fashionable know that it’s not just a dress that makes a statement, that it is crucial to pair it with the perfect handbag and the right pair of shoes. And therein lays the importance of the accessory designers. The right accessories have become an integral part of styling, and are fast emerging as an essential partners to designer clothes.

Taking this sartorial partnership to its next level is ‘Sarang by Gurpreet Kaur’, a unisex brand for garments and accessories. The brand puts forward its first collection 'The Love Cart’ in the Lakme Fashion Week Winter festive. Gurpreet promises to adorn this winter season with warmth and love, as embodied in her collection. Drawing inspiration from her rustic roots, and finding her muse in her memories of childhood years spent in a village, she has created a line of accessories that she says celebrates happiness in the simplest aspects of life. Crafting accessories from fabrics like pure silk and velvet combined with stones, wood and simple embroidery and hand skills, she intends to make ‘The Love Cart’ a joyous celebration of love through seasons. The collection is intended to compliment a wide variety of clothes, playing on unusual form and unique textures, to create signature pieces that stand out every time.

Gurpreet shared her mood board, the starting point for collection, as it reflects the emotions she was experiencing while she worked on the designs. Hope her collection brings a ray of sunshine to the winter cold.

Lakme Fashion Week Preview - Farah Sanjana

So the Lakme Fashion Week is around the corner, and the pre-week anticipation is thick in the air. The dates for the winter/festive collections are August 16-21, 2011. Despite August being rainy, the decision to prepone the Fashion week from September to August will help the designers get ample time to meet their order demands after they showcase their collections.

For me, one of the highlights of the Lakme fashion Week is the Gennext Show. This is where the future of Indian Fashion unfolds. Where young designers showcase collections, that will change the direction of the fashion scene in coming years. The designs are rough, raw, and very true to the essence of fashion and style. Of course, I love the works of established designers too. But it’s the young designers that I love to watch out for.

One such designer that you all must keep your peepers out for is Farah Sanjana. The young graduate from the London School of Fashion plans to style well-heeled women who have an eye for quality. In the UK, Farah worked a six month stint assisting pattern cutting for designer Vivienne Westwood, and assisted backstage at Paris and London Fashion Week, helping put together a dress for actress Kim Cattrall and working on Hollywood star Anne Hathaway's gown for the premiere of Alice in Wonderland. Following this, she returned home with innovation, quirks and a waste-not ethic, all of which she picked up on the job. She is now ready to storm the Mumbai runway with a crop of clothes that’s sexy and rebellious, basic and androgynous, and sometimes just plain strange. Architectural shapes, origami, detailed metal work, and extremely structured silhouettes are what one must look forward to in her collection.

If these pictures from her Summer and Cruise Collections are anything to go by, Farah’s blend of edgy sophistication with form exaggeration and bold colors is bound to make her a hit at the Fashion Week Debut.

Fashion Superstars - Steven Meisel

Steven Meisel is without doubt, one of the most influential fashion photographers of our times. Shooting explosive and emotional works for the very best in the world of fashion, his work features regularly in both US and Italian Vogue, and lately W (also published by Condé Nast).
Even at a young age, Meisel drew women all the time. He used to turn to magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as sources of inspiration for his drawings. At 12 years old he asked some girlfriends to call model agencies and, by pretending to be secretaries of Richard Avedon, to get pictures of the models. To meet famous model Twiggy, the 12-year-old Meisel stood outside waiting for her at Melvin Sokolsky's studio.
By juxtaposing fashion and politics and/or social standards, Meisel creates controversial and stunning layouts. Fashion’s superstar photographer is the force behind some of the most press-stirring fashion editorials in the past years. Here are some of his works from some well-known shoots.

Back from a break...

Hi. I have sort of taken a break from blogging these past couple of months. There was too much happening in my head, if not my life. Will be back soon with posts and updates. Have had to do some serious soul searching and need to make some life-defining changes. I have lost a lot in these past couple of years and am in the process of rebuilding my life and giving it meaning.

Do get ready for some interesting reviews and updates from my world. I intend to make Shotcouture all about fashion and lifestyle from my part of the world. So get ready for some new designers, models, photogs, as well as restaurant and movie reviews.

Off to Bhutan...

Will be back on 19th June with pictures and stories. Much love to you all. Here is a glimpse of this stunning country.

Say hello to Mr Olowu...

Breath in. Breath out. Relax. Calm down.

Okay. So this is pretty much my reaction to anything Duro Olowu. I gasp, I pant, and generally misbehave. The London based designer, who trained as a lawyer, and is now among Michelle Obama’s preferred designers, believes that fashion should be joyful. That it shouldn't dictate to women but it should invite them into the fantasy of the designer who is making them.
Hoo boy, Mr. Olowu, look up, I am right there, fantasizing about your designs!

Olowu, first discovered by Vogue's Sally Singer and Julie Gilhart, of Barneys, makes stunning fluid dresses, from vintage fabrics that he finds all over the world as well as new prints that he's been designing himself. Mixing prints on a background of cheerful patterns and vibrant hues, his Fall 2011 collection had plaids alongside watercolor prints and polka dots as well as different stripes juxtaposed against one another for a statement-making look.
Fur-trimmed coats, voluminous long skirts, form-fitting column gowns, printed capes ... There is so much to covet! Okay, there I go again.

Breath in. Breath out. Relax. Calm down.

Poetry in motion --- Miki Orihara

Dear God,
I will be really really good in this lifetime. Please make me her in my next lifetime.

Love and hugs,
P







A principal dancer of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Miki began her training in Japan at an early age in traditional Fujima Japanese Dance and modern dance with Nanako Yamada and Chizu Shoda. After graduating from Bunka Gakuin high school in Tokyo, she came to New York to study at the Joffrey Ballet School. She then received scholarships to study at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

In 1983 she became one of the original members of the Martha Graham Ensemble and thereafter shortly joined the Martha Graham Dance Company. The rest, cliché cliché, is history.