As the fashion mogul recuperates in the comfort zone of home, hearth and family, nursing a weary heart, the Wills India Fashion Week, autumn –winter 2010 Edition kick starts with its most loved designer missing from the aisles.

Rohit ‘Gudda’ Bal who underwent a heart surgery  will not be seen this season unless he obliges the shutterbugs with a guest appearance .Instead he lies in bed ,besides his favorite Alex Kersey painting, surrounded by guarding siblings who are ensuring that, for once, his hurricane pace takes a pensive pause. Sitting by his side to make sure that he steps off the accelerator, turns off the gas and gets off his speeding car that drove on the fast lane of life 24X7X365 days for the last twenty odd years.

1989 was the year when the fable began. The year he, Suneet Varma ,Geetanjali Kashyap  and Rina Dhaka began their careers almost simultaneously. It was also the year I came into journalism writing for what was the only glossy of those times. Society. I recall getting truly impressed with Gudda the first day I met him. Long blonde hair, wheat skin, young, ambitious full of beans and very restless he burst into the fledgling fashion scene as the maharaja of innovation .His inimitable persona had the social butterflies of those times fluttering in line to his creative tune. Nina Pillai, Parmeshwar Godrej, Maureen Wadia and  iconic models like Mehr Jesia, Madhu Sapre etc.

From stringing together global influences in an iconic way to realizing his roots and creating what can be called the great Indian fable revisited, Rohit has progressively become the face of Indian hand craft. You can see India re surfacing in his works constantly: In his obsession with the lotus, his Zen for reviving the block print in a new format, his unabashed use of color and his constant borrowing from  Kashmir where his roots still stand, ten feet  deep, under the Dhall lake’s sand bed. As the critics say, ‘ You can take Gudda out of Kashmir but never Kashmir out of Gudda.”

To me Gudda’s creative stance is always ‘beautiful’. Never surreal, never dark, or exhibitionist or even maverick. His designs have borrowed from classicism to add a pin tuck here, a swirl there or a bold element that clearly emerge as his unique style statements. His signature contribution to a rich textile and hand craft history that goes many neon years back. H is clothes create magical bodies .In his hand every woman turns into a mystical being.

What makes Rohit Bal, the man and the designer so iconic? How has he continued to ignite his aesthetic fable so consistently? Over twenty long years his shows are the only ones that go house full. Every row has the well heeled seated in full cheer. Many others also have the same lot in attendance. Difference being that they come for Gudda’s show because they ‘love the guy’. Because in these many years he has always met them with warmth, chatted them up. For him it is always about the relationship and he invites friends to his show even if they are  now bygones in the scheme of things .Forgotten scribes whom most of his contemporaries  strike off  from their list will be seated  front row. For him the relationship is cerebral and emotional and not a profit and loss statement. And that is why when the gong goes and the tamasha begins many eyes will seek this golden boy and pray that he soon bounces back with his chutzpah, style and seamless energy. In his anjuman (World ) there indeed is no dull moment.

Posted by : Anshu Khanna  at 12:30 AM