As this year’s fashion freshers queued to enroll at Central Saint Martins last week, one Ashish Gupta was to be found roaming the college halls, corridors, studios and library shooting his hilariously subversive spring lookbook. “It’s been 25 years since I started,” he said. “So I thought: let’s do 25 looks, one for each year, with messages.”
Gupta might have become a copywriter, not an independent fashion designer, had he not come to London, and graduated in the CSM MA class of 2000 under the formidable tutelage of the late Professor Louise Wilson OBE. (Which is the reason that Fabio Piras,the current MA tutor, welcomed him back to use the studio). “I studied advertising in India. First of all I thought I wanted to write,” said Gupta. This surely reveals at long last why he’s always been so good at slogans.
This season, they appeared on hand-written placards instead of T-shirts. Salutes, in Ashish’s pithy way, to students and protest movements around the world. Here are some. “Libraries Not Data Centres,” “Put Smart People in Charge,” “It’s a Dress Not a Yes” and “One of my best friends is Straight.”
“I feel like globally there’s been such a move towards fascism. And I just think it’s a dark time, and it’s doesn’t feel like a particularly hopeful time,” he said. “UK Garage Not UK Farage” tackles the rise of the far right in a way no British person can miss, but not all Gupta’s references were immediately obvious. “It’s very coded,” he said. “There’s a leopard trouser suit that stands for Jane Fonda, when she was protesting against the Vietnam war, for example. Or the photos where the model’s carrying pots and pans, which street protesters have used.”
Raising a laugh in the darkness might well be a good tagline for the multicolored sequin-spangled service that Ashish (the brand) has been providing in London, and to the world, for all these years. The darker it gets, the more loved Gupta is for alleviating the gloom. In person, his work is even more uplifting than it seems on a screen: everything, even what appears to be crochet or argyle knit, is created by the artisans in the Ashish atelier in New Delhi. “So,” he said, “that is why I wrote this one: ‘A Handmade Tale.’”
