LFW AW10: Ashish's Magic Carpet Ride

Without a doubt my favorite show of LFW and in the running for top five of all showscapades so far, not for reasons specifically sartorial, per se, but in terms of style and styling. It was bang on 100% my personal taste du jour, how I would clothe myself h-to-t had I the resources.  Essentially, comfort dressing underscored by an element of BAM (that would be the sequins) for the confident in fashion and young at heart.

Using references to traditional Uzbeki designs and inspiration from Turkmen and Kilim rugs, the collection struck the perfect balance between glitz and grunge, but unlike homeboy Alexander Wang (whose plait with a twinge of Tavi's greyblue kitchen sink rinse Gupta admittedly ripped off, but everyone's loving the plait this season and I can't blame them cuz it's pretty damn cute, so it's all good), Gupta's nearly perfectuated street cool is based in something a bit more substantial than American football (I went to see Avatar in lieu of watching the Superbowl).

The starting point of Oriental rugs was a really really good one. Sumptuous soft-looking chunky neutral knits and oversized tweed boyfriend blazers worn slouched over cable-knit printed sequin vests mimicked the dead wool (sheared from a, er, dead little lamb as opposed to a live one), harsh and rough because it has lost its natural oils, which remains as the undyed underbelly and fringe of the rug.

And the ultra-glossy sequined coated kaftans and baggy floor-length chilled out evening columns, swing sorts etc each sequin echoed a painstaking stitch in an Ottoman rug (upon examination with  a magnifying glass, a good quality shag is meant to have a "knot density" or "knot count" of up to 225 knots per square inch). I think with his carefully mosaiced sequins, Ashish produced a fabulously modern, flirty and fun rendition of his inanimate muse (with a few bunnies and other modern motifs a la Ashish Gupta worked amongst the traditional triangles, diamonds, doves, etc).

Click here to learn more about Oriental Rugs and how to count knots

Random anecdote.

When I went to Instanbul several years ago, naturally, my friends and I decided that the must-have-purchase to be had in the land where East meets West was a Turkish rug. And so we launched a massive search and began educating ourselves at markets along the way to the mighty Grand Bazaar. One friendly chap named Savash (how we became acquainted is another story for another day) was in the rug business going many many generations back. So upon being supplicated by the gringos about the do's and dont's of dropping a grand on some traditional upholstery, his most important piece of advice to us was thus: don't buy the shiny rugs. Shiny rugs?

Though I now forget what denotes a "shiny rug" now, it was the first thing that jumped into my mind when Ashish's walking talking shiny rugs shimmied their way down the ruwnway. A Turkish rug, because of the way its hand-stitched, will catch the light in different ways from different angles, hence changing the color palette depending on which direction its thrown and where the light's coming from. Ashish, with his go-to building block for his collections, sequins, was able to animate this feature of the rugs perfectly on his catwalk, as oranges went to peach and thence brown depending on which stage of runway traversal the model found herself.

  All in all it was just so damn cool, so effortless, so understated yet the sequined "rugs" shining out from underneath the softly bundled wool and tweed dressing gowns, enormous stovepipe trousers hiked up was poignantly on trend and jazzy enough for any night out. There was even a sequined pajama set, decisively more edgy than Dolce & Gabanna's version a few season's back (they, though I love loved, just looked like actual pj's pinched from papa's closet).


To wrap it up, Ashish Autumn/Winter 2010 is a magic carpet ride I want to take again and again.