Anupama Chopra sits down with Sabyasachi Mukherjee for InFocus at his new Delhi flagship, and opens with a confession that they have in common — neither of them, he insists, knows much about fashion.
Sabyasachi argues that the distance is exactly why he survived: it left him objective, fearless and free to make radical business decisions while calling himself a social observer rather than a designer.
He talks about why he defines beauty as confidence rather than anything physical, and returns to Vidya Balan, who came to him while being attacked for how she dressed, and to the period after he told her to simply keep wearing saris — a stretch he calls a golden run for both their careers, and one that got him blamed like a national terrorist by critics who were, he noticed, almost entirely women.
The conversation moves through a working life he describes as collaborative to the point of having no creative ego. He does not sketch, cannot sketch, and builds collections by narrating them to his assistants like a script, starting always from an imagined customer whose perfume, commute and hair he decides before a single garment exists.
He speaks candidly about having no ambition and a very private relationship with excellence instead, about assuming the Met's email was spam, about taking his own name off the storefront in favour of a tiger because he wants people to wear India rather than him, and about the discomfort of fame outside the zone where he works.
He explains why he no longer makes custom clothes for stars, why overexposure has become a disservice to luxury, and why Hermès is the one brand he considers untouchable. And he finally addresses the film — a script written fifteen years ago about idealism, unchanged by a single sentence, waiting for the business to be secure enough that he can start making movies plural.