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Rachna Nair melds European and Indian cultures of luxury into a range of precious pieces for your deserving home.
Indian craftsmanship is rescued from the brink as Rachna Nair injects it with a modernist vision of interior luxury.
Elaborate gold embroidery, minute sequins sheathing a cushion with the intricacy of a glossy serpent's skin, handmade silk foliage knotted into a weighty throw, and cashmere hand-woven in the Himalayan foothills into airy scarves – when Rachna Nair came to France seven years ago to do an MBA in luxury brand management little did she know that the professional route she took would lead her right back to her homeland.
Over the last year, in conjunction with a number of highly talented craftspeople in India, Nair has been developing Simbl, a capsule range of cushions, throws, luggage covers and scarves that completely turns on their head any preconceived notions about the application and outcome of the subcontinent's traditional fabled craftsmanship.
With a background in textiles that involved fashion production and sourcing in Delhi and Bangalore, Nair came to France with the intention of joining the big-time luxury leagues. Over the next half-decade she worked at Louis Vuitton, initially in the stores and retail for three years, and then in the Europe zone office managing the watch and jewelry business. "My previous experience had been in fashion, and this was not exactly fashion, it was more luxury, and it's a completely different business to what I'd done before," she said.
Then about a year ago she decided to put her textile training back into use and put a progression of personal projects into production. To wit, she mulled over a visit to India to source fabrics and find capable craftspeople. One of her motivating factors was the fact that, "I saw a lot of the older, very refined ways of doing things are disappearing." The country had changed a lot in the few short years since she'd lived there. Price and mass production pressures created a focus on cheap and garish handwork, "a Bollywood version of things," with fine craftsmanship suffering. "A lot of craftsmen had branched off into doing different things, a couple had even stopped doing what they used to do," she says. "It's not just a question of money, it's a question of time. It takes time to do that, and everyone wants things fast, going faster and faster."
In a sense, therefore, her idea of producing a throw of Indian raw silk leaves with stems rolled and knotted by hand into a large net that took four craftspeople over 300 hours to produce is going against the overwhelming industrial grain. Ditto a range of wool cushions with geometric patterns formed by embroidering the surface with hammered or raised silver thread, or a weave detail of silver and silk, or silk cushions with a scale of sequins mimicking the fuzzy form of a traditional Ikat motif.
While French or Italian leather is used to create sturdy topstitched, Indian-made leather cushions or the corner detailing on canvas floor cushion covers, cashmere scarves are handspun from the fine fleece of goats in – where else? – Kashmir. Herringbone, abstracted birds eye and optical square patterns decorate the two-tone scarves that are signed in a contrasting thread by their weaver, although a family that rears the goats rarely also produces the scarf as varying quality and color differences can occur unless the yarn is centralized.
Quality control and prototype and production confection are, unsurprisingly, top of Nair's luxury-led list. "What I really owe to Vuitton is a sensibility, to pay attention to the last detail, and I think that comes a lot from the opening into retail they gave me. You really start seeing things from a consumer's point of view," she says. "When you go to the consumer side of the table you realize it's a little bit like theatre. You are putting on an experience for the customer. And it has to be perfect."
As such the line's name – Simbl – is a generic one, not detracting from the product. "You use an object to signify, to represent something. The more we evolve the more we use symbols – language is a symbol," she explains. "You identify things, you relate to different objects in a context and it becomes a symbol for you – so, in a sense, everything is a symbol."
Obviously Nair's next step is to take her creations to the global market, from luxury stores to trade fairs, but she's already thinking ahead. "What I would really like to do is to work with an architect because I really like the whole idea of made-to-measure, of doing a space. It could be a suite, it could be a home, a yacht, whatever!" she says, bubbling over with enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that stretches to many areas. "I'd like to expand to different areas – I'd love to make furniture. I have absolutely no training in furniture," she admits with a burst of laughter, "which is why I didn't start with furniture!" However, back in India, she had furniture made for her house, "Which was great fun – and not exactly scientific!"
If that was a no-brainer then the intended extension down the line to bath accessories and home textiles that "have a strong personality and yet are easy to use" fits just as easily into her lifestyle plans.
But by the time she's turned her ideas into an empire isn't there a danger that there won't be a sufficient pool of talent to draw skilled workers from? "The level of workmanship is definitely slipping," she admits, but she's not hugely worried about the immediate future if the investment and interest is there to keep the skills alive.
"What I'd like to do is help the traditional work to evolve further, take the very high end, but let's go beyond the ethnic, that's gone as far as it can go," she says. "In India you tend to have a lot of beautiful things around you which you kind of take for granted, you don't pay attention to too much, until at some point in your life you realize this is rare and you'll never get this again, and there's a danger it will no longer exist in a few years' time." This fear factor is the force that drives her forward march.
Definition of luxury:
Time, the time to do anything. To push something to its limit, to see how far it can go, and that again takes time.
If luxury were a......
Place:
A personal space that I could do up as I wished.
Person:
That's difficult for me, as I don't identify luxury with one person, with a personality.
Thing:
It would have to be a living thing, have to be alive, something that changes in a way. It has to have a spirit of its own, a soul of its own. It's very vague but it's what you going to get!
Moment:
It has to be a moment that's either gone or is just about to happen – it's never the present.