The last time I talked to designer Rohit Bal, he was thinking of a fashion show with havelis and music, “a grand multi-sensorial theatre production in the time of digital coldness.” He was thinking about travelling to Banaras and was keen to take India’s Tier 2 cities by storm with his eponymous store in each of them. And when he did hold hands firmly during his last fashion show at The Imperial’s gardens, including one of my favourite Madonna numbers, Vogue, it was a reminder why Indian fashion will forever need him to show what a classic elegance is. So even if he’s gone, the enfant terrible of Indian fashion will always be the OG, who has been battling heart complications for the last few years and managed to stand tall, a wobble be damned. “They don’t let me have laal maas, oh the luscious fullness of it. I will get it cooked, come over on a weekend,” he said in our last interview. That never happened.
The ace fashion designer passed away on Friday following cardiac complications. He was 63.
Over the years, Bal has been projected in the media as an enfant terrible for breaking all kinds of rules. Good, he did that and broke the stiffness of an exclusionary elitism. That’s why you want to remember him as Gudda, a man with a generosity of spirit that saw him rooting for peers unobtrusively from the sidelines, standing like any other guest or cameraman. That comes from a rare self-confidence, the kind that doesn’t feel threatened by newer or even feels competitive. Because he knew he could come up with something that nobody had seen. Because creativity would not come from ego.
If Rohit Khosla can be credited for shaping couture in India with a design grammar book, then Rohit Bal should be credited for carrying it forward after Khosla’s death in his 30s. Bal himself acknowledged that not a single day passed when he didn’t think about Khosla. And unconsciously enough, he filled the contours of Khosla with classic elegance, accommodating the richest of Indian wear and heritage fabrics into a Western silhouette and its subtle grammar. Bal will forever be remembered for marrying tradition and individual talent with wearability.
Yet for all the rarefied environs of couture, he saw fashion as a mass culture statement. “Couture is the price of skill and artistry but that doesn’t mean that skill cannot be all-encompassing. I look at a person, see what they are wearing and know what their comfort, ease, flair and body statement are about, where they are coming from. My job is to express that language through my works,” he had once explained. That’s why he was the first designer to put out a pret line in Khadi and for Linen Club.
That’s the reason he stayed away from the familiar terrain of Bollywood endorsements despite being one of the first designers to be asked to do outfits for Kaun Banega Crorepati. He chose to be a man of several firsts. But since they came much ahead of their time or corporate marketing, they got covered by chatter and confetti.
A Bal show was a parade of designers and models, those whom he had grown up with and those he had groomed. And should he chance upon anybody going through the lows in their lives, he would make that person feel special even without knowing them, with a glass of red wine, some words of practical wisdom and the most lavish spread of Kashmiri cuisine, flying in the Kashmiri morel mushrooms just for you. As his last show momentarily brought back the abandon of the newly-liberalised 90s, there were peers like JJ Valaya and those he inspired like Rajesh Pratap Singh, Gaurav Gupta, Ashish Soni and Samant Chauhan. At another show at the Imperial in 2015, when designer Sabyasachi was doing a collaborative show with Christian Louboutin, Bal had cheered for him the loudest. Sabyasachi, not given to emotion, had run to the galleries to be with Bal, drawing in Louboutin and sharing an unfiltered moment of pure emotion. The three of them took a selfie, an unalloyed celebration of genius. That’s how Bal’s legacy will live in each of them.
