What brings you joy? A weathered old jumper; a moment of perfect ecstasy on a dance-floor; perhaps the humble company of close friends? The pursuit of joy has become a fixture of our day-to-day lives, its increased importance a consequence of the general unease and uncertainty that plague current times. But the subscription-plan strategies we rely on to reach it rarely get us anywhere close, leaving us with a synthetic rendering of happiness, not the soul-replenishing feeling we crave. Joy, after all, is fleeting rather than perennial, incidental rather than planned.
It’s this light, ephemeral glee that fuels Ashish AW20, a loud, proud counterpoint to the dark clouds that loom outside. At a time when tomorrow has never looked less certain, this is a call to celebrate the colour and fantasy to be found in the here and now. To say that patterns and prints feature prominently would be an understatement: across tailored jackets, pants, and halter neck jumpsuits, familiar polka dots, zebra stripes and leopards spots have been reinterpreted. There are blockish geometric patterns, metallic art-deco swirls, and bright daisy splotches, too. Silhouettes span a similarly eclectic breadth, with underskirts and puffs of faux fur yielding volume, counterbalanced with slinky, feminine fits. Cast in all the colours of a rotating kaleidoscope, they issue a flamboyant ‘fuck you’ to any attempts at oppression.
To describe the rainbow chintz on show as ‘print’ would, however, be a misnomer. This season, Ashish returns to sequins with renewed aplomb. Larger paillettes are layered to mimic the dreamy shimmer of hazy watercolour brushstrokes, while granular sequins are fastidiously beaded to recreate and reinterpret nostalgic visuals. The chosen materiality serves as the lynchpin for this ode to joy. “Using sequins has always been an act of rebellion,” says the designer. “It’s a medium that people aren’t necessarily very kind to, but there’s just something so joyous about it.”
Delicately clumped on striped mini dresses and mock neck evening gowns, they call a glimmering lurex knit to mind — in a red and black plaid effect, we have a disco-ready take on a macho-man’s lumberjack shirt. This process of elevating the identifiable and the mundane through such intricate handcrafting speaks to the joy to be found in fantasy — in departing humdrum, quotidian reality to inhabit new, glitzier states of mind, if only for a brief period of time.
Joy is found in glamourous pretence, in picking out a character — a society lady on her way to a dinner, perhaps, or her daughter heading downtown — and living out that fleeting fantasy to its fullest. What Ashish offers is not a prescriptive treatise on what joyful dressing looks like. Instead, it’s an expansive, extroverted lexicon that allows you to articulate what that means. This an invitation to take respite from the storm outside, to slip on your best dress and do just as you please. This escape may only last a moment, but please: enjoy it as if it were your last.
Mahoro Seward
