As a design team, David Abraham and Rakesh Thakore’s partnership has endured the best part of 20 years. They have a third partner, Kevin Nigli, who completes this triad of designers, and who handles the business side of things, including their numerous trade shows in Paris and twice yearly show at Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week.

David and Rakesh were in the same batch at National Institute of Design in the 80s and after graduating they worked separately for a while. It was a chance meeting, says Singapore born David, when both were at a “loose end” when they decided to start the company. This "loose end" was about a growing realisation that something new and interesting could be done with Indian textiles. David had been working for an American buying house, and Rakesh had been developing his textile work with government sponsored textiles projects; he had also organised a major textiles retrospective for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Kevin, who had studied at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Delhi, had worked for David before, joined the team as well.

It’s always an enjoyable experience to visit their studios in Noida where, beyond the chaotic street market outside, a cool white-painted building is home to a hive of design and production activity. It is here that they work on their very distinct vision of Indian fashion, grounded in India’s rich heritage of textiles and reinterpreted in designs that breathe fresh life into age-old Indian weaving traditions.

Their most recent collection was another point in the consistency of their design vision. Here were saris which looked as though they had printed using bold, graphic houndstooth.

Houndstooth woven tweed was originally associated with menswear. Its use in women’s clothing signifies a kind of androgyny, rejecting prettiness and asserting a particular kind of female power. The styling of the Abraham and Thakore collection underscored this with monochromatic tones of white, black and grey pervading the collection. Large square black patent satchels added to the utilitarian feel. The occasional flourish of assertive bright colours only served to reinforce the general mood of power dressing for the work­place.

Houndsto­oth itself is a pattern with an established tradition of reinvention as part of fashion design history. Starting with Christian Dior’s iconic oversized houndstooth in the 1950s and then reinvented by the late Alexander McQueen in the 1980s with his characteristically twisted take on established classics.

Whether or not Abraham and Thakore were consciously drawing on this design history, their own recent reinvention of the houndstooth check provided another point of departure for this classic pattern originally associated with menswear. In Abraham and Thakore’s show, a houndstooth sari in subtly contrasting bold black and gunmetal grey was overlaid on acid yellow silk.

But here is the real wild card, the houndstooth check shown as part of the collection is not printed, but woven Ikat, using the traditional resist dye methods and weaving skills of craftsmen more known for the saris of Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.

Abraham and Thakore’s vision is not only about design, but also how design can be pushed to protect, sustain and take forward the traditional weaving skills and livelihoods of weavers.

Famous for the saris, which represent knowledge passed down through generations, the Ikat weaving process is an exercise in complex dye-resist methods that demand precise mathematical expertise grounded in knowledge passed down generations.

The hanks of yarn are dyed using a complex balance of portions that are dyed and portions that are left out. This is achieved by tightly tying parts of the yarn so that they are protected from the dye when the hanks are dipped. It is when this yarn is woven on the loom that the pattern hidden in this intricate play between the dyed and the not dyed unfolds into the distinctive Ikat patterns. It is not easy to comprehend how this is done! They work it out on a graph, says David who admits an equal astonishment at how ingenious this is. The Ikat weavers use something akin to mathematical equations to produce works of beautiful art, incomprehensible in its complexity.

Yet with the declining number of women who buy and wear saris across India, the future of many sari-weaving traditions is uncertain. It remains important to find ways of translating these traditional handloom techniques across to contemporary markets; this is the focus of a vast amount of NGO, government and design industry activity in India today.

David believes there needs to be a shift in the way craft is perceived. People are so used to being able to buy a fine ha­nd woven kurta for Rs 500 from the local haat that they don’t see the value in it; they are shoc­ked when a hand woven kurta cost Rs 5,000.

“Look at that one,” David says, pointing to a finely hand woven dress in the studio, which graduates from a white border on the bottom, and cuts away to dense black on the body. “See the jagged line?” That he says is the resist-dye method of weaving, “but stripped down to its most elementary expression.”

Abraham and Thakore have a loyal following among a certain set of affluent clientele, who appreciate their simple aesthetics and the heritage of weaving traditions they bring to their designs, while framing these within modern lifestyles.

They have three standalone stores in India; one each in Bangalore and Mumbai and one in Delhi’s DLF Emporio, one of India’s premier luxury retail destinations.

David says that around 18 years ago one of their first intern­ational buy­ers, The Co­nran Shop, ord­ered a batch of black and whi­te scarves made by the same weavers who wove the recent coll­ection of hound­sto­oth Ikat saris.

For David it’s a remarkable wor­king relationsh­ip, he continues. “So we have gro­wn together

phyllidajay@mydigtalfc.com