No more kitsch kitsch

As far as fads go, the infatuation with Mumbai ‘icons’ on everything from clothes to home furnishings has lasted a long time. The mania even subverted the notion of kitsch: a ‘kitschy’ object was no longer something cheap but, rather, quirky and fashionable. However, for those beginning to smart from the pastiche of BEST buses, vada paos and autos on T-shirts and stationery, coasters with the Gateway of India on them or cushion covers embellished with dabbawalas, there’s a clutch of new stores that offers some visual relief.
A number of design and design-related stores have opened in the city in the past year, all of them fiercely contemporary. Filter at Kala Ghoda was started in December 2011 by ad agency Alok Nanda and Company (ANC). As white as an art gallery, Filter stocks all sorts of objects. There are ‘exercise books’ illustrated with graphics of Shakespeare lifting dumbbells and doing push-ups, postcards with old advertisements, water in sculpted bottles and Indian Stretchable Time watches that are marked ‘12ish’, ‘3ish’ and so on. The dominant colours in the store are black and white. “Alok’s (Nanda, the head of ANC) got a sense of minimalism so we thought we’d take that through,” says Ajoy Advani, a senior creative partner at ANC and the store’s creative director. The motive for the store, he adds, is to give the agency’s designers an outlet for their creativity. Filter also invites young designers whose sensibilities match ANC’s to display their work at the store. “It’s called Filter because it’s stuff we curate,” Advani says.
Earlier this month, industrial designer Ajay Shah converted a part of his office under the Mahalaxmi flyover into Everyday Project, a store at which he sells his designs as well as products imported from foreign design companies such as Holland’s Droog and Anything and Kyouei from Japan. Stencilled in bold black capitals in his office is Shah’s motto: ‘As little design as possible’. This is evident in his spartan furniture. Shah, who designs furniture for retail outlets and food courts, offers monochromatic tables and chairs in materials such as sheet metal and fibreglass, geometric lamps and stationery by Rubberband, a popular brand of notebooks that he founded four years ago. “Our design has no frills, no embellishments,” Shah says. “It’s about using material the way it’s meant to be used. I love fun so that’s where the colour comes in. Nothing is beige.”
Pranav Upasani, architect and owner of Art And Design Bookstore in Colaba, says that he sees “a great deal of movement towards design-oriented stuff. There’s a need for these kinds of places as there are hardly any good design stores in the city.” Upasani converted a small section of his office into a bookshop in July last year, as he felt there wasn’t enough literature on design available in the city.
His cubicle-sized store sells titles on topics from furniture and interiors to automobiles and product design. Upasani says that since he’s not motivated by profit, he’s free to import the books, magazines and journals he finds interesting rather than ones he thinks would sell. “We don’t have the inclination to read good design magazines,” he says. “Reading them will initiate a big change in the way designers work and think because they connect you with the work people are doing across the world.”
According to Shah, this minor burst of design outlets signals a desire among professionals to reinvent Indian design. “In India, most design means something that is ethnic,” he says. “But there’s a small group that’s trying to bring forth a new design approach, to make design more contemporary.”
Divya Thakur, a well-known graphic designer, says, “I definitely see design from contemporary India finally finding a voice and not simply echoing the visual language leftover from the British Raj—that is, that of kitsch.” In June 2011, Thakur opened a store in Colaba named after her label, Design Temple. The store largely sells home accessories, including old favourites such as her ‘Cheer-haran’ toilet paper which is imprinted with Duryodhana’s fist pulling Draupadi’s endless sari. “Our work at Design Temple is obsessed with being contemporary, that is, belonging to the world, and yet being as true as possible to our origin and points of inspiration,” says Thakur. “I believe this is in sync with the sentiments of modern India.”
A clutch of new stores is taking contemporary Indian design in fresh directions.