India Today – August 13, 2018

INDIA TODAY SPICE 20 AUGUST 2018

By CHINKI SINHA

Photographs By SIDDHARTHA HAJRA

DESIGN

COVER STORY I FASHION

Fashion’s Agent

PROVOCATEUR

W

ith the black nail paint and kohl that intensify his eyes, Kallol

Datta, who was once called the Lady Gaga of Indian fashion,

is easily an agent provocateur. He has changed the rules of de-

sign, disrupting how people view fashion through one of his

first collections, Grotesque Nonsense which was showcased at

the Wills Lifestyle Fashion Week in 2012. In a modern resurgent India where most

designers’ muse is the confident woman, Datta says he has always been inspired by

the dark and the mysterious. He once said “body is a given” and is always dressed

in abayas he creates. At the core, it is gender that forms his design philosophy but

there are many other metaphors he works with like body shaming.

The anti-designer designs clothes that are inspired by road kill and the sag-

ging breasts of an 85-year-old woman. Given the limited ingenuity of the fashion

THE
ALTERNATE
Random Access
shown at
Experimenter
Gallery in
Kolkata in 2017