BAHAUS MEETS MAHESHWAR
GRADUATION PROJECT WITH
Bahaus meets Maheshwar is a festive collection of Maheshwari sarees. The collection explores the craft of traditional cotton silk saree weaving of the river front town of Maheshwar, Madhya Pradesh.
The image shows the learnings taken ahead for the project. The collection is an interpretation of works of Bahaus students and faculties Annie Albers and Gunta Stolzl through Maheshwar sarees with Fabindia's design vocabulary. All the sarees were designed on Adobe Illustrator and then printed in life size with labels and sent to Delhi office via post.
Textures solid lower drape, striped aanchal with gold highlights and shining gold- blue palla set on luminous blue that shines like the blue on a peacock. Kangra border, muthda border, aankh border and phool kinar of gold adorns the saree.
A play of crimson, rust and black to changing the perception of colour with another colour's interaction at different parts of the saree.Maheshwari traditional aankh border, muthda border and baan border adorns the saree in gold.
Engineered stripes passes along the warp and weft of the saree creating diverse textures with different count and coloured yarns. Scarlet, crimson, navy blue and caramel brown stripes are embellished by traditional Maheshwari dani border and V border and gold zari.
Alluring colours, Sea green, teal and yale blue creating tonal shades with proportionately intensifying silver zari. Sarees has simple Muthda and Mohaniya traditional Maheshwari borders of silver zari.
Coral, wine red and scarlet solid colour blocks with traditional Maheshwari chand tara texture and meerani chowkda texture adorned by traditional Maheshwari tara border and muthda border with gold zari.
Electric blue, crimson, magenta and gold low count yarns run along the saree's body. The border has luminous ultramarine blue and crimson with traditional muthda and phool kinaar of gold zari.
A vision in rani pink and irish violet, this design includes large borders with traditional Maheshwari tirchi chatayi border and Narmada border of gold zari.
The saree creates a visual play with orchestrated rani pink, scarlet, wine red stripes with contrasting beige border with Maheshwari traditional muthda border and chatayi border in gold zari.
Mustard, jamla violet, rust and crimson, colours that people usually don't mix up or traditional Maheshwar sarees. This saree stands out to show whats possible like once Annie Albers and Gunta Stolzl did in Bahaus. The saree has traditional Maheshwari chatayi border and narmada borders to captivate the colour's richness without loosing it while getting mixed with other yarns. Other traditional borders boondi and muthda can also be obsreved in gold in the saree.
This project gave me a thorough understanding of how textiles are designed or large markets. Unlike the learning from Raw Mango, which had a specific clientele, Fabindia served people from diverse age, culture and aesthetics. To design textiles for such a base was a first time. The project helped me understand the average preferences of a layman. Though I didn't get to be part of the process of a digitally made design to a woven saree as all samplings were cancelled by the sponsor, I got to see a lot of the such processes happening before me while I was working in the office.
Project guided by - Devayani Vaish
Faculty guide - Sucharita Beniwal