Sisters Divya Niranjan and Navya Niranjan, although living many thousand miles apart, have managed to bring out exciting collections of clothes over the past two and a half years. Their fashion line — Blueprint’s latest offing is Dastkari. Divya Niranjan gets talking to us about this unique line of fashion. “Our clothes are very structured. The continuity that you can see in all our collections is that we take mens-wear staples and remake them to suit women. That does not mean that we just take a man’s shirt and alter the size for women. We make sure we add elements, twists to the clothes. We can say for sure that our clothes are not ‘sexy’,” starts Divya.
The Chennai girl says that her idea of a Blueprint girl is that she is very strong, individualistic and unique. Quite like the name Blueprint, her clothing is a representation of lines and cuts. “It is like we are architects and the clothes are our designs,” Divya puts it in simple words.
Dastkari, which means ‘handcrafted’, is their fall-winter 2017 collection. This comes after two previous years, which saw them releasing their Kharkhana and Gaatha collections.
Navya, who lives in Santa Clara, USA designed the clothes. In her words, inspiration is — “Sleep-wear is one of the main inspirations for Dastkari. Something comfortable, anti-fit and which also follows our continuing trend of remaking men’s style.” The main fabrics used for this collection is khadi, sourced from Ponduru village, Srikakulam district and Kashida from Urmul, near Jodhpur. And adding a total contrast to this is the wax linen sourced from Los Angeles.
Despite the style being completely contemporary, Divya says that handlooms like khadi gives her the right stiffness for the clothes to look structured and straight. “Going by our anti-fit principle, we can’t have flowy fabrics like chiffon and georgette in our clothes. While drawing a plan for Dastkari, I happened to meet a fabric supplier who had some great khadi fabric, which matched what we already had in mind. Even though the clothes are contemporary, we use Indian names which makes up for the theme of the line as well.”
The collection launched on their website designbyblueprint.com yesterday and Divya says the collection has already gained great response.
“With every collection’s release, the response we get is that it is better than the previous one. I hope that trend continues,” sums up the fashionista.
