Project 02
This collection begins with a rule I decided to break. Banarasi brocade was made for one colour, one occasion, one day. The fabrics carry the history. The construction carries the argument.
The six looks
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Explore the looks: sketch to AI renderThis collection begins with a rule I decided to break.
Banarasi brocade has always come with instructions. One colour, one occasion, one day, then it’s folded away for good. Red for the bride. Gold for the groom. Blue for the ceremony. No mixing. No exceptions.
This collection breaks every one of them.
Colours that were never meant to meet now share one body. Drape crashes into structure: soft panels stitched against hard architectural lines, asymmetry slicing through both, so the body moves through fabric that’s working against itself. And then the knits enter the fight: stretch against stiff jacquard, two textures that should never share a seam, forced to anyway.
But the brocade loses nothing. The weight is still there. The motifs are still there. What changes is the room it’s standing in. I pulled the cloth out of the wedding hall and placed it under stage lights, and the fabric that once whispered “this is the one day that matters” now says something louder, freer: every day matters.
Where this fabric comes from is the whole point. Banarasi brocade goes back to the Mughal period, when court patronage turned Varanasi into a serious centre of textile production. The city was already a seat of Hindu learning and pilgrimage. What arrived with Mughal influence were Persian and Central Asian techniques, pit looms, and Muslim weavers, who ended up rendering Hindu motifs in gold and silver zari.
The lotus, the kalga, the vine: forms drawn straight out of temple cosmology, all of it translated through Islamic craft. Two visual systems, from entirely different religious traditions, occupying the same silk. No negotiation. No announcement. The weavers just kept weaving.
So my collection isn’t inventing that clash. It’s inheriting it. The brocade was already built from things that weren’t supposed to belong together. I’m simply doing out loud what the loom did quietly five hundred years ago.
The fabrics carry the history. The construction carries the argument. And the message is simple: this cloth doesn’t belong to one day. It belongs to every day.
The full Vivienne Westwood × FAD portfolio: mood, concept, colour, fabric and trim boards, the range plan, and every look with its technical flats. 17 pages.
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