Water hyacinth spreads across many Indian water bodies with a flowering confidence that has made it, for generations, a plant people wish away. In Biskohar, the Siddharthnagar town where Anurag Gupta grew up, jalkumbhi is simply part of the water. On 16 October, at Taj Palace in New Delhi, it arrived at Lakmē Fashion Week x FDCI as a bodice, a mask, a sweeping silhouette and a body of work called Artisanal, and the room saw a material that Indian ponds have long treated as a nuisance holding its own against tailoring. 

Gupta's route to that runway began in a village without pucca roads, in a home where fashion was never discussed. His parents ran a medical store, he learned English as an adult, and he trained under Varun Bahl and Manish Arora before launching his label in 2018. The label has since built a reputation for the unexpected: embroidery made from scrap, a newspaper print drawn from his habit of following current affairs, a Hokusai collection in IndiWool Denim developed through an IIT Delhi incubation. Earlier this year, The New Primitive was shown on a ramp built from upcycled rubber. A designer who treats materials as arguments was always likely to look at the plant in his own backyard. 

A BODICE THAT GREW INTO A MASK

The piece that holds the collection together is the woven bodice that extends into a mask, and Gupta chose it as his favourite without hesitation. The design decision behind it is the most interesting one in the show. The team set aside the usual route of weaving flat cloth and cutting it into patterns, and instead wove directly around a mannequin, so the garment's shape arrived through the weave itself. Behind-the-scenes images from the studio show exactly that, with hands pinning a ribbed, curved bodice onto a form as the structure takes shape. Gupta remembers the suspense: "Even after it was made, we weren't entirely sure how it would translate on the runway. But when the piece finally arrived at our studio and the model tried it on, it felt as though the craft had taken human form. That was one of the most inspiring moments of the process. It showed us that the material could go beyond being a surface or an embellishment and become the design itself."

The idea carried through the whole collection. Looks began with the crafted piece and the clothes were built around it, with structured tailoring, layered construction and deliberate surface manipulation echoing the raw, organic grain of the fibre. The palette of earthy browns and greens came straight from the flora and landscape of the region. "We wanted the woven water hyacinth to remain the focal point, so we often began with the crafted piece and built the look around it," Gupta says. "The silhouettes, textures and construction were developed to complement the weave rather than compete with it."

THE LOOKS

The finale look is the one that stays in the memory. A model walked in a chocolate-brown notch-lapel jacket with long, gloved sleeves folded across the torso, over a rust-toned skirt that pooled with silk-like softness at the hem. Over it all hung an enormous cape in a distressed, open, lace-like weave, its edges stretched wide on rods at the arms until the whole silhouette read as a pair of wings. The face disappeared behind a mask of tightly clustered round knots, like a bunch of berries, so that the garment became a figure and the figure became a sculpture.

A second look turned the palette to cream. An oversized ivory blazer and wide-legged trousers carried a delicate brown floral line print across the lapels and sleeves, with long russet fringes streaming down from the shoulders like roots, and a brown tie belt pulled the waist in. Above it, a mask of thick, coiled brown cords, woven and knotted like a basket turned into a face, gave the whole look the ritual quality of a harvest festival.

In the studio garment looks, the register shifts to olive and earth. One ensemble pairs wide-legged olive trousers and a belted tunic with a sharply shouldered jacket in a tufted weave of navy and tan, its cuffs and hems left deliberately frayed, and a hooded head covering finishes the silhouette. Another takes a long olive coat with exposed white topstitching and a high hood, layers a rust underskirt beneath it, and places over the top a hand-woven tan pinafore whose looped, concentric arcs swell outward and finish in a loose, fringed hem. The design sketches on the mood board sketch the range further, from a tiered skirt of horizontal rows of strands ending in long tassels to the winged coat that became the finale. Detail shots show a wicker-woven shoulder piece with a spill of fringe resting on a brown notch-collar coat, a belt hung with wooden charms and small metal fittings, and scissors working at a distressed knit.

LABOUR MADE VISIBLE

Anyone who has watched the finished weave might assume the hard part was the design. The women of Biskohar know where the hours go. "The harvesting itself is incredibly demanding," Gupta says, describing how the invasive plant grows in overwhelming quantities and still needs immense patience before it becomes usable. After drying, "each strand is individually flattened and prepared by the women before it can be woven. The process is far more extensive than one might imagine when looking at the finished weave. It made us conscious of the skill involved and pushed us to create pieces that truly reflected the complexity of their work."

The fibre set its own terms too. Moisture makes it pliable, yet it has limits in flexibility, and the team spent weeks experimenting, reworking and revisiting ideas until the material showed what it could do. "In many ways, these limitations became part of the design process," he says, "pushing us to create around the material rather than simply use it as another textile."

PROJECT BISKOHAR

Artisanal is the public face of Project Biskohar, the initiative Label Anurag Gupta developed with Earthomadic Foundation to create livelihoods through craft. The collection note describes the work as a tribute to women whose lives have been shaped by generations of sex workers, social stigma and circumstances often beyond their choice, and says it seeks to shift the narrative from exploitation to empowerment and from inherited circumstances to self-determined futures. The proposal sets out a 30-day training programme for an initial group of 30 women, covering harvesting, processing, weaving and product development, with stipends during the learning period, and it aims to connect traditional knowledge with design, production and access to markets. Reports describe the work as a long courtship of trust: about ten months of persuasion, and an agreement from the women only after the first consignment of products was booked. That sequence says a good deal about the seriousness of the project. 

Gupta's account of what drew him in is direct. "The material was already part of their surroundings," he says, "and the collaboration allowed us to explore how their familiarity with it could translate into a valuable craft." His wish for the women is equally plain: "The aim is to create opportunities for these women to build a future with dignity and the freedom to make their own choices. Bringing this story to the runway is an important beginning, and we hope it can grow into something meaningful and lasting."

CRAFT IN THE LEAD

Gupta's closing answer states the ambition of the whole collection. "I wanted the line between the craft and the clothes to become almost indistinguishable," he says. "We created wearable crafted pieces and then developed garments around them, with silhouettes and textures that complemented and drew inspiration from the weave. The intention was for people to see the craft not as an accessory to fashion, but as something capable of leading it."

On a week when Indian fashion has spoken at length about craft, Artisanal offered a working example. It came from a designer who went home, looked at a plant the town had ignored, and trusted the hands that knew it best. At the finale he stood at the centre of the runway with palms pressed together, flanked by the masked figures and the winged cape, and the line between maker and garment had rarely looked so thin.

Source: French Press Global