Grazia India
Coupling up for collaborations has been all the rage with designers globally and in India. But, what power do they wield?
When the Sabyasachi x H&M collaboration was announced last year, my group chats were flooded with messages from friends who were excited at the prospect of owning a Sabyasachi garment. For many of us, luxury fashion, though coveted, is often unaffordable. With collaborations, fashion becomes a democratised commodity that reaches newer audience segments.
For Fall 2021 Couture, Rahul Mishra turned his eye towards the abstraction of the elements playing around the island of Santorini.
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Drawing from the five elements, Santorini sprung alive on the garments rendered in silken threads and hand-tacked intricate details. Like many of us, Mishra turned to new skills in the lockdown, with a study of architecture. This technical viewpoint is clear in the embroidery swatches that layer against each other to create the soft and lingual city plan of Santorini. Representing the infinite variations of water and fire are layered scalloped edges and piled tulle sculpted to depict fluidity.
With comfort taking precedence over looking fashionable, where does that leave high-heels?
The depths of our closets have transformed into the fantastical wardrobes from C.S Lewis’ imagination. However, instead of mythical lands, they now house the mystical garments and footwear that were de rigueur prior to 2020. It’s not the voluminous gowns and tight jeans we miss though. It’s the high heels.
The Netflix show ironically skirts the very line of creativity and business it is meant to spotlight
Halston, the new limited Netflix show about the iconic American fashion designer Roy Halston, falls into a cookie-cutter biopic mold soon after it begins. Starting the journey of the storied, but oft-forgotten 70s designer at his childhood home in the middle of parental strife is a predictable but acceptable beginning with a young Roy Halston Frowick crafting a hat for his mother. Within moments, Halston achieves stratospheric fame with Jackie O sporting his iconic pillbox hat. The show tumbles through his ambition in the first episode, showcasing his evolution from milliner to the first high-end designer to diversify into a variety of products. But that’s not all it tumbles through.
Love them or loathe them, we’ve all unwittingly kept up with the Kardashians
Last week marked new drama surrounding Khloé Kardashian. When an unedited bikini picture of the reality star was posted to Instagram, her lawyers worked fast to get it taken down, which only exacerbated its popularity. As a feminist, I believed it wasn’t my space to comment on the image in question. After all, celebrity or not, no one deserved to have a non-consensual image of themselves up on the internet. And whatever my personal beliefs on photoshopped images may be, Khloé Kardashian reserved the right to decide what images of herself were available to a global audience.
Pronouns are important. They might sound grammatically incorrect, but is the language greater than the person?
“But 'they' isn’t grammatically correct!” “You look like a boy/girl. Why not use he/she instead?” “This is all too confusing for me!”
People give the most intense defenses when refusing to use an individual’s preferred pronoun or refusing to acknowledge their gender identity. As a cis-het woman, I have never personally had to contend with misgendering or being addressed with the wrong pronouns. I’ve led a privileged life. But that isn’t the case for numerous people who identify as non-binary or don’t fit into the restrictive boxes of traditional gender traits.
What is it about Korean dramas and romances that has us hooked?
Any form of art is essentially an escape from reality. And more so in the last year when any plans of actually escaping our daily lives were thwarted by the ever-looming pandemic. As we all turned to our screens yearning for the escape that the fantasy of Netflix shows offered, one genre gave us the sort of fantasy most of us had left behind in our teen years. K-dramas. For anyone who’s grown up on a steady diet of trite Mills & Boon novels or spent hours watching rom-coms with every imaginable trope, Korean dramas are a natural extension of that.
Jenny's back on the block with former boo, Ben Affleck, again. What does that say about rekindled relationships?
Jennifer Lopez’s Jenny On The Block is a cult favourite for millennials. After all, who can shake off the song’s catchy tune or erase the vivid image of Ben Affleck literally kissing J.Lo’s butt as he effortlessly unties her hot-pink bikini bottom? The early aughts super-couple personified celebrity back then with the incessant tabloid coverage they received. Their relationship even heralded the era of mashed-up celebrity portmanteaus like #Kimye and #Brangelina. It is only natural, then, that the news of a possible rekindled romance between the two is making a splash across the world.
“I want a boyfriend like Cha Eun-woo”, “I want a Korean boyfriend” – these sentences may have been uncommon a few years back, but with the widespread Korean wave, or Hallyu, that has taken over pop culture lexicons globally, the phenomenon of fans yearning to date people who resemble their Korean idols is quite prevalent.
You probably don’t know this actor yet, but you will, soon.
Fantasy has never been truly inclusive. Whether you consider George RR Martin’s Westeros or JRR Tolkein’s Middle Earth, female characters are either few, treated poorly or reduced to a plot device to develop the male characters and their arcs. The lack of diversity in these fantasy worlds is also glaring, which is why watching Amita Suman, a young actress of colour, play the dynamic Inej Ghafa in the upcoming Netflix fantasy adaptation, Shadow and Bone, is a monumental moment.