After showing collections in Washington D.C., Toronto and Sydney, Tara Bhuyan came to Gurugram with Woven Dreams of Assam. The Assamese designer from Toronto, who keeps a low profile, sources most of her fabrics from women weavers in the remote villages of Assam.
An investment banker for two decades, Tara is on a sabbatical for a year. Making clothes she says, is in her blood. “My mother, Sewali Dutta, is my first guru. She showed me how to cut the cloth; she stitched all my clothes, until I started complaining that I wanted to buy modern merchandise like my school friends. When I look at photographs, she was the finest designer. What was popular then has now come back into fashion. It is a circle.”
Apart from her mother, it was her grandmother’s association with Gandhiji that motivated her. “My grandmother, Hemalata Datta, was a writer and freedom fighter. Mahatma Gandhi had lunch at her house at Sivasagar, located in upper Assam. Bapu said Assamese women weave dreams in their looms.” Her use of non-violent Muga silk (the silk worms are not killed) is her tribute to the message.
Even though Tara has no technical knowledge of fashion, she says her design ideas “start from the ramp and I work backwards.” She looks at creating Indo-Western outfits, sometimes teaming the Northeast weaves with various other traditional silks and brocades of different parts of India. She’s also intent on reviving the two-piece Assamese Mekhela Chador. “It came to Assam with the Ahoms, who came from parts of Cambodia, Burma and Thailand. So, I haven’t created anything new but have draped the Mekhla Chador in different ways.”
Popular motifs, she says, are the khing-khap (lions facing each other), mogor (creeper), mina (jewel), miri (tribal art), gos (tree), jaapi (bamboo hat), moyur (peacock ), gor (rhino) and the gumkharu (traditional bracelet) designs. “Most are the artistic translation of everyday objects on the cloth or silk.”
However, working from abroad comes with its own set of challenges. “My biggest challenge is that the weaves that are woven in far-away Assam are only based on my description of the final product. Sometimes the final product is quite different from the product that I had in mind for a garment. The second challenge is a lack of professionalism in terms of timelines and colour palettes.”
Her collection will be available at tarabhuyan.com towards the end of March.