Known for her vibrant designs and floral motifs, Ranna Gill is here with yet another floral bunch and series of prints at the Lakme Fashion Week x FDCI.
Carving a noteworthy niche in the domain of fashion is one thing Indian designers are turning pros at. Having said that, one such designer we’ve all eyed for years now aka Ranna Gill quite recently marked a successful episode of her sartorial magic at the Lakme Fashion Week x FDCI. Known for playing with prints and working with shimmer, Ranna Gill sure is a name to reckon with in the fashion scape. Her latest showcase ‘Casa Dei Fiori’ ran around the lines of effervescent hues and modern silhouettes, adding more to the label’s existing charm. A vibrant palette strutted down the runway, and to amp things up even further the elegant diva, Karishma Kapoor closed the show for Gill. If you want in on what went behind curating the collection and what’s more in store for the label, here’s an exclusive and insightful conversation to look at.
In conversation with ace Indian fashion designer Ranna Gill
Tell us, how was the whole experience of presenting your collection at Lake Fashion Week x FDCI?
It was great! I was really happy to be in Bombay. I have 3 stores in Bombay, so I have a retail presence and it was really important for me to show in Bombay. I mean in Delhi I’ve got so many stores, but here it’s different. So Bombay was a very important place for us, it’s just really important and Lakme is really the only platform in the country, so it was the best. It was really great. I was very happy to be a part of it. I really kind of put my heart into it.
So tell us a little about your collection Casa Dei Fiori and where did the inspiration come about?
As a design house, we love florals. It’s like that’s what our USP is. So you can always find prints in our design collection season after season. They will always be there will be a very important part of our signature I was at lake Como with my husband four months ago and I was just like we just took a teeny break because they’re always working so much. And I was just sitting there by the water and looking at the landscape, the breezy architecture,e and I was like, oh my god, I mean, this is just perfect. So that’s where Casa Dei Fiori was born! I took it from there. So, came back to Delhi and put it on the drawing board, all of us. And we started thinking about the prints and how to bring them back to the landscape and the type of florals. I mean there are so many different types of florals. So this particular floral palette and how we kind of do inspiration from there. So it was kind of born there and then we took it from there then we built upon it.
Tell us, how was this collection a cut above the rest of your collections?
This was more elevated. I feel we did more elevated styles for our customer who’s been asking us for evening styles, she wants to go out for parties or for occasions. We have, we’ve been getting this request from our stores that our customers are asking for elevated evening dresses, elevated going out dresses, pantsuits, even like destination wedding like when she’s to go attend destination wedding for a friend’s wedding or a family member’s wedding and she wants to wear really playful clothing, not very serious Indian. The kind of clothing she needs to attend or even if she is the bride, she just wants to be very youthful, playful, and modern. So we kind of elevated, the Ranna Gill signature and that’s what we put on Karishma, that’s what the girls wore, that’s what I wore. So, we kind of elevated what we did to a higher level.
Since Karishma Kapoor was your showstopper and she looked absolutely beautiful. So tell us how do you think she resonates with the brand?
I think she’s so elegant and very beautiful. And it was a really beautiful fit. We wanted to have a Bollywood presence on the ramp, which was very important for us. Also being in Bombay, it was kind of a perfect fit and her name came to us and that was it! It was a connection. I said oh she’s perfect, she is Casa Dei Fiori. You can see her at the lake Come by the water sitting during her evening and wearing that outfit, it’s not even a misfit. It’s not like we’re putting it, we’re forcing it on someone, or she doesn’t fit or it doesn’t belong. So I think it is a perfect fit, and she loved it we loved it, and I think the audience loved it. So our new collection, what it embodied and how it looked on her, I think it all kind of ticked all the boxes.
Since you mentioned earlier as well since you know your silhouettes are synonymous to loads of prints, so where do you get this urge to actually just play with prints and go breezy on your designs? Where does that inspiration come from for you?
As a designer, I love color. You’ll always see color in a Ranna Gill collection so we will always play with colour. It’s very important for us to be a colorful joyous design house. It’s just depending on the season, depending on trends, depending on what we feel we bring out. We always love color it’s like in our DNA it’s part of our signature we always love prints that’s another part of our signature. So these essentials are always there when we start to design a collection and then we see we want to elevate it or we want to make it more completely high summer or completely holiday or spring or fall. So that is the next step but the color and prints are always kind of part of our signature and they always will be.
Since you’ve been in the industry for years now, so tell us what is the difference that you feel between then versus now? What’s the difference that you feel over time in terms of ready-to-wear fashion?
It’s really taken off and the difference between then and now is there wasn’t a ready-to-wear concept 20 years ago. It was only an Indian clothing concept. Everybody would only wear salwar kameez. But there was no ready-to-wear concept. We kind of paved the road. I mean, my design now is one of the few that pioneered it, we got chopped and rolled out. Now people want ready to wear. Now everybody wants dresses now everybody wants pants, shorts, and jackets. Now they want blouses. It’s so big and so relevant and it’s such a big part of fashion. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anything at that point when we started was nothing. So now it’s like whole planning, everything goes behind production, planning. We have, you know, collections, we drop collections in stores, we show collections. It’s a big drop-down plan. And it did become bigger and bigger and like many, multiple, bigger as we move forward.
Lastly, tell us what’s next in pipeline for Ranna Gill.
We are very excited, we’re opening a few new stores, one more in New Delhi, and then we’re opening our first store in New York. It will open around Easter and that’s what I’m really excited about because we have stores in New Delhi, we have stores in Bombay, but this is our first international store, and that too in New York. It is opening in the Hamptons, so it’s like a beach town it’s a resort town, and that’s our first store. So we are very excited to be opening at Easter. And that is very close to my heart.
Hero and Featured Image: Courtesy Rannagill/IG
Jhanvi Duggal
Lifestyle Writer
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