Rimzim Dadu: Narrative Thread

IT’S RIMZIM DADU’S first day back at work. A few weeks earlier, the Delhi-based designer had her second daughter, taking a maternity break but not quite a complete hiatus from work. Dadu’s Hyderabad store, her first outside Delhi, opened during her maternity break and is currently awaiting a formal launch. She handled the entire project on Zoom, supervising everything from the finishing touches to the puja that marked the opening. “I am not taking away from the excitement of having my daughter, but I did feel a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out] from work,” she says. “I don’t enjoy breaks too much.”

We are meeting at DLF Emporio, the luxury mall in Delhi, which houses some of the biggest luxury brands in the world along with Indian designer ateliers. Among these are two Rimzim Dadu stores. The first—offering ready-to-wear and couture for women—has been open since 2020, and the second was added last year to retail her burgeon­ing menswear line.

The label has been part of her life since she was a 21-year-old fashion graduate and is now two years shy of clocking two decades in business. During this period, Dadu has come to be regarded as one of the sharpest innovators of Indian fashion. In her design, steel can transform into a fine silken strand, zari can be twisted and turned into a grunge avatar, and a jamdani sari can be made from silicone. Dadu has been working with alternative materials for a long time, but recent years have seen her take particularly big leaps in design and craftsmanship.

Beginning with her 15th-anniversary show at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in 2022 to debuting at the India Couture Week (ICW) in 2023, Dadu’s creations seem to have elevated both in terms of glamour and design dexterity. It has caught the attention of everyone, be it ce­lebrities like Kareena Kapoor Khan and Radhika Merchant Ambani or interna­tional luxury brands like Cartier, which commissioned Dadu last year to create a work of art for the 100-year anniversary of its Trinity collection. Dadu created a three-toned metallic sari-dress, inspired by the Trinity ring combined with her own wearable art.

CLOTHING HAS BEEN Dadu’s calling for as long as she can recall, telling her primary grade teachers that she wanted to be a fashion designer. She credits this desire to her father who runs a garment export com­pany. She remembers accompanying her father when he travelled for meetings and trade shows even when she was very young. “After school, I would sit with the karigars [artisans]. I would do little bits of embroidery, tie-dye, or cut fabric and make my own clothes. My father would take me shopping and really made me a part of its world,” she says. “Growing up in such a setting, it became a part of me. What would I be if not a fashion designer? I can’t imagine anything else.”

After graduating from Pearl Academy in Delhi, Dadu started her label almost immediately—then called My Vil­lage—when she applied for the GenNext programme at the Lakme Fashion Week 2007. Dadu’s debut pret collection, show­casing her early experiments with cords and textures, received positive reviews.

Abounding in surface engineering and textural experiments, Dadu’s designs distinguished themselves from the very beginning. However, it was her experi­ments with steel that turned into an in­flection point for the label. In 2016, actor Sonam Kapoor wore the label’s black and blue sari made of steel wires at the Cannes Film Festival, sparking consumer curiosity. Dadu developed her first steel sari as a “one-off piece”, showcasing a new material intervention. “I didn’t think it would become a signature, but eight years on, it’s still one of our bestsellers,” she says. New iterations of the sari are displayed at the store and seen on everyone from celebrities to brides. Dadu jokes that she often hears from customers that it’s tiring to wear one of her steel saris, not because of any difficulty of dressing, but because everyone else wants to touch and feel the material.

The steel wire sari is an engineer­ing marvel—the material spun into 0.45mm wires, as thin as human hair, and sewn together finely on a fabric base. When Dadu began developing the sari, bewildering her team in the process, she sought to transform the hard metal into something “soft and malleable”. Such processes are not limited to steel in her repertoire. Many of the designs incorpo­rate strands of zari threads, twisted into cords and stitched for a grungy effect. Chiffon gets the shredded and corded effects and metal recurs across collec­tions in new forms and textiles. A decade ago, Dadu made a patola surface using leather cords for her Autumn-Winter 2014 collection which made its way to the iconic Fabric of India exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Lon­don. She brought back the design in her 2023 couture collection, this time using leatherite, a synthetic leather replica.

“My idea has always been to pick up existing materials and transform their basic nature into something that nobody associates with them” she says, credit­ing her father again for instilling in her a desire to be unique and do something new. “I was trained in fashion design, and not textiles, but I never thought it would be okay for me to just pick up textiles and make a garment. When I’d pick fabrics or even traditional materials like thread, I would try to use it non-conventionally.” Picking up “random materials” and putting them together to create a surface design or a material akin to textiles— Dadu notes that these are “technically not fabrics”—remains for her a perenni­ally exciting endeavour.

Dadu’s gradual transition into couture hasn’t been surprising. Her design and craftsmanship are inherently attuned to the processes of bespoke tailor­ing. Even when she is not using new ma­terials, the designer is pushing the needle on what she can achieve. Take Stucco for instance, her most recent couture collec­tion inspired by Baroque aesthetics and showcased at ICW 2024. Dadu applied the cording technique to create ornate designs, bending the materials into curv­ing motifs and stitching them together. Dadu incorporates her materials and techniques into all kinds of garments, from miniskirts and pantsuits to red carpet-ready gowns and bridal lehengas.

BEHIND THE breathtaking designs are years of R&D. Creating a mate­rial is only the first step, making it more functional and user-friendly for buyers is key. In Dadu’s three-storied stu­dio and factory in Noida, small, technical questions grow in monumental propor­tion. Dadu says. “If I am stitching steel, I have to work out the lining? What kind of needles will not break? How can custom­ers clean and store it or travel with it? ”

There is also the task of training artisans to work with such materials. Indian craftspeople are masters of thread and needle, but steel and silicone are another matter. Retaining her artisanal team is of paramount importance for Dadu. Training new artisans can take months, beginning with the simplest stitching and slowly graduating them to take up specialised skills. Every iteration of a design is also a new challenge—to mould and to fit to individuals, none of whom may have a model’s figure. As she says, “You can showcase a collection on the runway, but how do you adapt it to different people, sizes, and body types when you are selling it?”

Every design thus becomes a labour of love, and a culmination of several weeks of work. Dadu will readily admit that her production capacity is limited. Every design from the Stucco collection can take four to six weeks of production. Add pre-and post-production steps and a single ensemble will take almost two months to make. The response to tight deadlines and urgent orders may often be a no, but Dadu’s designs are exceptional for the very reason they are time-consuming and small in production numbers.

Her production has also impacted the way Dadu has built her retail footprint. Besides her own stores and e-commerce website, Dadu retails from only one Indian multi-designer store, Pernia’s Pop Up Shop. “Retail is an experience. Clothes like ours need storytelling. More than that, they need the right team who can communicate what the products are and help customers with trials. Everyone who walks into the stores should leave appreci­ating what we have done,” she says.

With time and each collection, Dadu has also expanded her product repertoire to include artfully designed metal bags, footwear, and belts for women. Men can take their pick from footwear or a line of adorable bow-ties. In the early years, Dadu made menswear on special request. In 2019, she included just a few pieces in her collection for the first time. But the category did so well, that menswear ended up occupying half the store. “We didn’t have enough space to showcase womenswear anymore, so eventually we opened a separate store,” she adds.

The incredible response to her mens­wear collection surprised Dadu, but she had ensured it herself. Dadu targeted a wide gap in the middle, adding her signature materials to t-shirts, shackets, cocktail tuxedos, and bomber jackets which have proved bestsellers.

For the moment, Dadu is in multi­tasking mode—playing with her older daughter, taking care of her younger one and catching up on sleep scheduled to go hand-in-hand with launching the Hyderabad store and starting work on her next couture collection. But she is tight-lipped about its details at the mo­ment. What she does reveal is her future ambitions: “I want to focus on building the brand internationally. We are start­ing out with the Middle East which I think has huge potential for the label.”

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