Little Shilpa: Goddess of small things

Shilpa Chavan, pixie-sized milliner, stylist and designer, features on CNNGo TV's Mumbai show this week, taking us on a journey through some of her favorite bazaars. 

Whilst many of us have abandoned markets for the gilded chill of the shopping mall, a leisurely stroll in search of inspiration is a pastime millions share, and searching the market with littleshilpa -- both her nickname and her label -- gives us the opportunity, for a moment, to take part in the beginning of the design process and to explore the mind of this creative Maharashtrian designer.

Magpie milliner of Mumbai

You often hear designers talking about the source of their collections as "flashes" of inspiration, of a sense of the "rightness" of a line, material or color.

More prosaically, more honestly, most designers are magpies, whose watchful eyes can fall on the most unprepossessing thing and spin it into gold. Shilpa Chavan is exactly that kind of designer; no object is too humble to be considered an inspiration.

Shilpa Chavan on the CNNGo TV shoot, in the by-lanes of Mumbai's Bhuleshwar market.

Chavan has transformed objects as diverse as empty plastic bottles, children's toys, rubber chappals and market stall underwear into spectacular sculptures that rest upon the body.

Trained as a milliner at Central St Martins, followed by a stint at Philip Treacy, Chavan's work is a marriage of art school flair, exemplified by a lack of concern about definition and boundaries, and rooted in Mumbai culture.

"I don't plan the collections," Chavan says. "I pick up things because I feel they are interesting and then I hoard them. I let them lie for a while until I start feeling strongly about what I can do with a piece, and it can take years to figure that out."

Her recent collection, Battle Royale, shown at Lakmé and London Fashion Weeks, and soon to be seen in Seoul and New Delhi, started with a collection of military regalia Chavan had been building for about seven years.

"As I traveled I collected more and more of these pieces from all over the world, but it was only this year I realised that I really wanted to do something with them that had an Indian regal fantasy to it," she says. The results are arresting.

Super Indian, 'in-your-face' fluro

It's no surprise that Chavan's work as a fashion stylist, something she started just a few years ago, has become a real influence on her design.

"I always think of my pieces in picture form first, how good a picture will it make, which is a stylist's way of working," she says. "When you work as a stylist you are constantly aware, looking beyond what is out there already, and your mind gets trained to look for inspirational pieces and different perspectives."

Chavan is drawn to form and color -- "super Indian, in-your-face, fluro."

"It's about looking at shapes and objects differently," she tells Business of Fashion. "When I find a shape, be it a rubber slipper or a paper kite, the first thing I think of is how it could be worn on the head. Then I think downwards into jewelry and other accessories like badges, belts … but it really starts with the shape."

The idea behind her Mumbai Devi installation for the Bombay: Maximum City festival in Lilles in 2006 was born when she spied a man on the roadside selling peanuts.

"The way he was holding the paper cones seemed beautiful to me," she says, "I imagined flowers tumbling out of it, although, as always, my first idea changed when I started working on the piece."

Making her work herself is critical to the development of her ideas.

"I am really involved," Chavan says. "I don’t want to make a hundred pieces of the same thing, I don’t want to be distant from it. Each of my pieces is different, the colors or placement changing in each object."

Crafting value

That she remains committed to creating every piece herself is one of the most interesting elements of her work.

It may well be a timely approach, with many luxury brands chasing a global consumer increasingly drawn to the local and the personalized, but Chavan's dedication to craft is far from transitory. 

The lookbook for her latest collection "Invitation to the Voyage" quotes from 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. It’s a revealing choice, as it was Baudelaire who celebrated the "ragpicker," a figure he believed gave new value to things that industrial society discarded.

Backstage at the littleshilpa Lakme Fashion Week show September 2010.

"Everything the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects … He sorts things out and makes a wise choice," wrote Baudelaire at the turn of the century in Paris.

He could equally have been writing about Shilpa Chavan.

"I am very nostalgic," Chavan says. "I love the simplicity of old school living, old school life -- I’m holding on to this in the face of the speed of modern Mumbai."

Her work could equally be read as a call to recognize what society is discarding, the value in old ways. For Chavan, those values are bound up in craft traditions.

"It's important to have the knowledge of the craft you’re working in, because only once you have studied the rules can you break them. By saving old items and making new pieces out of them, I also want people to appreciate their quality, because in many cases the craft is at a level you’re never going to get again." 

For the pace of modern life has impacted hand skills as severely as the convenience of the supermarket has eroded the experience of a time-consuming stroll around the market place.

Chavan operates in a world where the time it takes to learn a craft, up to 15 years, is a turn-off to a generation raised on instant celebrity (represented by "Indian Idol") and where the cost of quality craftsmanship is antithetical to a mass consumer culture.

God(dess) of small things

Her work also seems to celebrate and complicate the realm of the feminine.

Chavan's interest in the "small things" of everyday life -- blue skies, the markets, handiwork, joy in paper cones -- combined with her "ragpicking" and the "disorderly trade" (so called in the 18th century because it was often women's work) of re-visioning, repositioning the old within the new, does ask questions of what it might mean to be a 21st century Indian woman.

Particularly since Chavan's catwalk women are so formidable, so striking in their theatrical carapace. A witty and astute play on the forms bedecking Indian gods and goddesses, her work enshrines an idea of the sacred nature of the everyday.

Conceptual art or sculptural fashion?

"She should really be concentrating on sculpted and architectural works," writes London fashion journalist Colin MacDowell, in response to the littleshilpa catwalk show in London earlier this year.

"Her collection was exhilarating but, in fashion terms, pure fantasy. Her work should be in galleries, not on catwalks."

Littleshilpa's Swarovski head piece, worn by Lady Gaga on the cover of FLARE magazine in December 2009.

And so it has proved, with Chavan exhibiting this year at New Delhi's Nature Morte, and Sheikh Majed Al Sabah's I Love Souk in Kuwait.

"I never consciously stepped in to the whole art scene," she says. "It's the fashion that has given me the shift in to that. You know, in the art scene, my work is conceptual fashion, in fashion its sculptural art. All I know is I don't want to be a brand. At least not yet anyway."

What Chavan does want to do is tell stories, and that's a force that drives the extreme and striking scale of her vision.

"It depends on how much space I need to tell a story," she says. "I made a piece for the Stephen Jones exhibition titled 'Headonism' in London. It was inspired by the city's early morning skies, dried twigs and trees, which in my mind began to overlap with the skies and bright colors of Mumbai. If I had tried to tell that story on a small scale I couldn't have done it. I need to explore an idea across a series of pieces, and scales, to unravel the story."

So what have the markets uncovered for little Shilpa recently?

"Actually, the last time I went was with CNN," she says, "and I found these incredible aluminum boxes which have now become my packaging, reshaped and curved, taking the shape of the pieces they contain." The first samples arrive this week.

Littleshilpa is stocked in National Permit, a seasonal store in Goa, Bombay Electric in Mumbai, Kabiri @ Selfridges and My Sugarland in London, the Al-Sabah art gallery in Kuwait and Drap-art gallery in Barcelona.