Meet India’s top bridal designer to Bollywood stars, Sabyasachi Mukherjee

Gulf News

Sabyasachi Mukherjee has designed the bridal outfits of Bollywood actresses Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Deepika Padukone, Katrina Kaif, Anushka Sharma and more, but he says there’s more to these elaborate clothes than meets the eye. The Indian designer talks to Gulf News about his craft and his massive fame.  Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/3eWeCxf  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #BridalDesigner #India #SabyasachiMukherjee

Transcript

00:00When I try to do my work, irrespective of being in the fashion industry and high-end,

00:04I try to be as democratic as possible.

00:09I have a lot of Arabic influence in my clothes. I think I have had it from day one. In fact,

00:15you know, when my first collection came out, a lot of the influence, if you read online,

00:21was about deserts and gypsies and traveling nomads. A lot of the Middle East, Turkey,

00:27a lot of Europe, a lot of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma,

00:33has been a part of my lifelong inspiration. I started jewelry three years ago, but even

00:39privately I was selling jewelry to a lot of your Arab royal customers for a very long time.

00:45So I think I understand the market. And yeah, while the jewelry addresses

00:50the Southeast Asian demographics and weddings here, but there's a lot of already established

00:56Middle Eastern customers for whom the jewelry is also being brought and curated for them.

01:00When I try to do my work, irrespective of being in the fashion industry and high-end,

01:05I try to be as democratic as possible. If I cannot be democratic in terms of prices,

01:09I like to be democratic visually in terms of accessibility. I always speak of cliches and

01:15languages that people can easily understand. And so for me, body positivity has nothing to

01:20do with the fact that it's a fad right now, or it's something that people are talking about,

01:25or something that is going to become a bigger global acceptance at some point of time.

01:29But I think that when I look at my consumers, my consumers come in all shapes and sizes,

01:34and it's very important for me to have a representation of models that talk about

01:38them. They are the people who build my business, and I should be speaking about them.

01:43I don't care about industry because I set my own rules and I march to my own tunes. I don't even

01:47do Fashion Week anymore. I democratically show my clothes on Instagram because why show to 500

01:52people when you can show to 5 million? And I think that when you want to create a visionary brand,

01:58you don't really have a proof of concept. You don't have a proof of concept for product. You

02:01don't have a proof of concept for marketing because you literally have to reinvent the

02:05wheel and start from scratch. I have never shied away from anything, whether it's gender fluidity,

02:12whether it's body positivity, whether it's skin color, whether it's embracing

02:19culture in a very modern way. When I talk about the consumers today, they are very well educated,

02:24very well researched, very well connected. And I think if you want to survive in a modern world,

02:33it's very important for you to understand that the values that you hold might not be the values

02:38that they necessarily admire. It's important to be able to, through osmosis, create a sort of

02:45bridge between the old and the new. We work very hard towards doing that constantly. I think we're

02:50going through both maximalism and minimalism at the same time. There is going to be no middle path.

02:55This has happened worldwide through all crises, whether it was the Great Depression, whether it

03:02was the Second World War, even if it's a pandemic right now, there are going to be two kinds of

03:08people. One kind of people who will have seen the suffering and they will learn from it and they

03:12will say that, you know, we need to be responsible. So there are going to be people who are going to

03:16be ethical shoppers. There are going to be people who are going to talk about sustainability.

03:20There are going to be people who are going to talk about ecology, circular economy, recycling,

03:24upcycling. And there is going to be another sort of customer who are going to say there's one life

03:28to live. Let's just blow it all up. And let's just let's just be reckless. So there is going

03:35to be exuberance and there is going to be restraint. And both of them will co-exist side by side.

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