At the splendid ‘India in Fashion’ exhibition, curated by the acclaimed Hamish Bowles for the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), one outfit in particular made you stand and stare in gobsmacked awe. In a room full of extraordinary clothes made by extraordinary people―Alexander McQueen, Elsa Schiaparelli, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, and our own Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla, Tarun Tahiliani, Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Anuradha Vakil―an all-white ensemble made by Ritu Kumar was unusual in its understated glory.
The anarkali and gharara was made for the ‘haldi’ ceremony of actor Athiya Shetty’s wedding to cricketer K.L. Rahul earlier this year. It was the reproduction of a 15-year-old archive, a ‘jugalbandi’ between Kumar and Martand ‘Mapu’ Singh, where the textile historian and curator had asked the couturier to make something with white hand-spun khadi. She found the finest matte khadi from Jaipur and Benares, and teamed it with gold and silver zardozi and gota embroidery, inspired by motifs from the 19th century. Kumar made just two or three versions of this as she says it was too beautiful to put in a store. The outfit almost whispered ‘the queen is still the queen’.
Kumar has been making clothes for close to 55 years. That is longer than anyone else in the country. It is even before the terms ‘fashion’, ‘designer’ or ‘retail’ became part of India’s vocabulary. What did she call herself at the time then? “I called myself nothing, I was just making printed scarves and saris. Mapu and I were barefoot doctors in the field. We wore Kolhapuri chappals and kurtas, and that’s how we worked,” Kumar, 77, says with a laugh.
The Ritu Kumar label, now fronted by her son Amrish Kumar, will be showing after almost a decade at the India Couture Week in Delhi on July 26. Kumar is still responsible for the research and design template her son and their gargantuan team produce. Her legacy is unimaginable in crafts revival, as well as in pioneering entrepreneurship. It is almost as if she gave the prototype for the rest of the Indian fashion industry.
“I did not know a thing about craft when I moved to then-Calcutta as a young 21-year-old bride,” she says. “I was an art history student in the US, and did a museology course at the Ashutosh College in Calcutta. I heard about the archeological site of Chandraketugarh outside Calcutta. It was as old as Harappa and later became a maritime hub. I discovered lovely hamlets in Bengal with these immensely skilled crafts people. I understood what had happened to India historically, particularly to that area. Over 250 years of colonisation had impoverished the country. Serampore, a centre of silk printing, was a Danish colony, but they had burnt all their wooden blocks. I appreciated their art and just wanted to give them work. I gave them basic designs to print and they made it look beautiful, because the silks were so rich. I was never taught craft or fashion―Pupul Jayakar and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay were in distant Delhi―but I had this Archie comics dream. So I travelled to Delhi and I learnt.”
Journalist and cultural activist Jayakar sent Kumar to block printers in Farrukhabad, UP, where she discovered a family that had been doing nothing but blocks for the last 300 years or so. “Some ancestors were Persian, some were Uzbek; they had come through the Silk Route. They refused to sell me their blocks, but agreed to make some for me. So that is what they did for 25 years. Eventually, we set up a unit in Calcutta,” Kumar recalls. “I had started exporting scarves. I went to Mulhouse in France, which copied Indian textiles for industry, and Lancashire in England.”
Kumar began selling printed silk saris for Rs120 each, sharing space with a grocery store in Calcutta. Her second store was an upgrade―the garage of a building in Nepean Sea Road, Mumbai. She sat with Rosemary Crill at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (it still has the largest and best documentation of Indian textiles), learned all about zardozi, and took those designs to her Farrukhabad printers and embroiderers.
Today, Kumar is thrilled with the dependence Indian fashion has on its crafts. “When we started out, we had no choice,” she says. “We could not import anything, not even a button or a zip. I had sent a piece to Neiman Marcus, held together with drawstrings and tiger claws. We learned tailoring along the way. Every designer was their own manufacturer and PR person. We could not get denim from a factory in Ahmedabad, because they would not entertain us with the limited quantities we needed. The only place we could be creative was with the craftsman. India has an organic and indigenous handwriting in fashion, and Indian designers are just catalysts.”
She says she will not take credit for starting anything. “Indian textile crafts are so rich and I am a nobody,” she says. “I could not design a block, or print with one, or create an alchemy of colours like the dyers did. I just join the dots.”
Her study of textiles and embroideries even led her to people’s godowns. “What I made caught the eye of the dealers in Chandni Chowk, who took the copies to the masses. They are so important. I tell you, we on the ramps have no impact. When it really works is when it is copied,” she says with a smile. Kumar was the first designer to receive a Padma Shri in 2013. She remains only one of two designers to have got this honour, the other being Wendell Rodricks.
She was also the first Indian, along with Fabindia, to get into ready-to-wear retail as early as the 1980s. “We are not a country with only one handwriting,” she says. “The folk and the one-of-a-kind coexist. If we have a buti done for a Jaipur royal and a refined buti in Bagru, neither is a poor cousin of the other.”
In 2002, her son Amrish launched a mass line called Label, and in 2021, another one called Aarke. In 2019, the Ritu Kumar label diversified into home furnishings. The Ritu Kumar label still comprises the biggest chunk of the pie, with Label coming in second, Ri (bridal) and Aarke next, and Home still rather small. “A lot of things happened within the business and within India as well,” Amrish, 45, tells me. “Ritu Kumar had about seven to eight stores across India when I joined the business, but we had one product line that was particular to one type of woman. The Ritu Kumar woman had grown up a little bit, and we needed to create for the next generation, too. The idea of Label was to create more product categories.”
Thanks to Amrish, the company also integrated into a strategic partnership with Reliance Brands in 2022. The corporate house now owns 52 per cent of the company, and is in charge of finance, administration and HR.
“I will never retire, but I volunteered to focus on research. There are too many openings of retail spaces now, and I cannot keep up,” says Kumar. “We are the first company where the next generation is the creative head. I don’t want to be hands-on. I want to write and I want to paint.” Her health is also playing truant with her. A fall last year injured her spine and put her in a temporary brace. “I can’t walk the ramp now,” she says with a laugh. “I cannot even drink Scotch anymore. I don’t know what Mapu and I have put into our systems all these years. I can only drink wine now.”
Kumar has collected textile fabrics, blueprints, shawls, and actual embroideries from museums and dealers. “Education in our field is very important, but so patchy. I have an anthropologist’s collection from Bhuj and that area. I am a big collector, but some things which I have bought for myself should be put in a museum. Besides my entire repertoire of designs,” she says. “Pramod KG of Eka has been working on it for six months, and even I did not know what I have.”
Kumar is also bringing out a book with curator Mayank Mansingh Kaul. “The working title is Yatra, and the book will take you to all the areas I have worked in,” she says. “It tells you where to go, where to stay, how to get there and who to meet. Younger people need to take over India’s textile traditions, and they need to rough it out, too.”