Rimple & Harpreet Narula’s Enchanting SS’17 collection – Qafila

“Qafila” is a tale of travel and transcendence… a reverie borne out of Rimple and Harpreet’s quest for the subliminal and the artisanal… a never-ending wanderlust and the soul-searching journey that takes the designers across the globe exploring cultures and customs that get woven into their creations through the language of motifs. The collection is a nuanced amalgamation of heritage and craft as the designers delve into antiquated surface ornamentation techniques such as “Warq ka Kaam”, block printing and gotta embroidery on handloom Chanderi silks and cotton.

The collection is a veritable travelogue through the medium of couture as it charts a Bohemian wanderer’s perpetual pursuit of discovery, traversing across cultures and landscapes picking up motifs of reminiscence along the way, each reflecting various moods and fascinations en route with nostalgia, pathos and melancholy. The spirit of the collection is of longing and desire, to hope and to rediscover, to lose one’s “own” to regain the “self” in the process.

The sun-kissed stark landscapes of pebbles, sand and stone traversed by this eternal drifter renders the collection in hues of muted ivories, golds and beiges and just as the sky transforms itself over the passage of time and place- the color palette meanders into earthy marsalas, deep purples and inky blues while the artworks find inspiration in the designers’ love for old textiles and their sublime leitmotifs. A mélange of motifs- the French Paisley, Arabesque cartouches and flowering trellises, the Palampore “Tree of Life”, Mughal artworks, towering minarets, and fantastical Birds and Beasts are used by the designers in a painterly fashion to chart the eclectic course of this drifter’s journey, an everlasting quest of the body and soul across the sands of time.

Rooted in an ethos that overlays tribal elements with cultured artworks and puts them on the same stage, the collection is a marriage of the refined and the rustic, the rural and the urban, the tamed and the untamed…an homage to the odyssey of the eternal wanderer.