Fashion designer Raghavendra Rathore, who recently opened a new store cum office in Mumbai, talks about his plans to focus on more than just designing clothes
Mumbai Guide, Fashion, Bandra, Fashion designer, Raghavendra Rathore, Fawad Khan, Marine Drive, interview
Q. Was there any particular reason to open store in Bandra?
A. The demand has quadrupled. We have a very keen Bollywood clientele, which is close to this area. This apart, youngsters who are making it big are also looking for a place where it’s possible to plan one’s entire wardrobe for the whole season; the store at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel is too small for such a venture. This is more than clothes — it’s about gifting, product design, too. This kind of appeal emerges when you really know the customer.
Designer Raghavendra Rathore at his new Bandra store. Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
Q. Design is a vast topic. How do you decide on your projects?
A. The key is to customise — it could be designing a product for someone, real estate or designing services. We are working with a hotel chain where the senior management is given a 360-degree view of the world by training them with the help of videos and preparing them for the service sector. With this store, I am looking to connect with those clients. We work in a Lego fashion — interlinked talented personnel from across the globe who are brought in for different projects, and allotted to different projects we take up. Education is a pursuit I am really keen on. We also work with a trust and 15 to 30 % of our clothes are by the women who come from underprivileged backgrounds. We plan to get them to create gifts too.
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The store will look at customising options for gifting, be it a golf stick or your summer wardrobe. A new addition to the accessories on offer are custom-designed buttons made of precious and semi-precious stones.
Q. How essential is design according to you?
A. One area that I have been speaking about for a while now is that is our government should have a Ministry of Design, or at least, a panel. If you take a simple example of flyovers in our country, they have no identity. Some of these are designed so badly that they end up disconnecting families that live around them. By design, I don’t want to put up some wallpaper or fancy lights. There was this one time when I took my son to the zoo in Delhi — we had the worst day of our lives because the zoo wasn’t controlled. Design applies to everything. Good designers from National Institute of Design and IIT go abroad because there is no market here. There is no structure that our next generation can grow up and be proud of.
Q. Where do you aim to take your company with the current set up?
A. Right now, the idea is to make the company, an Indian brand, luxurious. By this, I don’t mean that when you walk into a store, it must look like a Louis Vuitton store — you change the DNA of the brand to look like a French store. The idea is to empower design in general, like sugar — you can make a cake or a cup of tea — design too is like that. Our existence has been exactly like India’s mission to Mars. We do not have enough wealth to invest, just like when established international brands were looking for investors and partnerships to grow, 40 to 50 years ago. Innovation is important right now. You can’t be seen just as a clothing brand. That should be replaced.
At: Turner Road, near Moti Mahal, Bandra (W).
Call: 66713638
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