British-Indian fashion designer Ashish Gupta has established a reputation for high-glamour outfits designed in his studio in East London and then hand-made by skilled artisans at his small workshop in Delhi. Over the years Gupta has grown his eponymous label from winning the prestigious NewGen award three times to being exhibited in the V&A and The Met.
He has used fashion as a site for social and political engagement will be highlighted through examples of some of the politicized slogans for which the designer is best known. They include designs emblazoned with ‘MORE GLITTER LESS TWITTER’ devised in response to the election of President Trump 2016 and a new version of his celebrated ‘IMMIGRANT’ t-shirt.
Last year he partnered with the William Morris Gallery on the Ashish: Fall In Love And Be More Tender retrospective. The exhibition spotlighted Ashish’s Autumn Winter 2017 collection ‘The Yellow Brick Road’. Inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939), a film that holds an iconic place within Queer culture. The season drew on an interpretation of the film by the Indian-born writer Salman Rushdie which interprets the story as an exploration of migration and an individual’s ability to determine how they identify ‘home’.
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His latest project is a new limited-edition photographic book named Looking For Now which features 64 original photographs which is an ‘intimate and often provocative document celebrating queer longing’..
Ashish has explained his subject matter as being “full of joy, humour, longing, desire and more than a little feeling of tenderness about sex and sexiness. It’s also about exploring images of sexuality and masculinity, but not just the type of images that we tend to see in the mainstream of gay culture
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The book is available to order via HouseofVoltaire.org with global shipping or
from House of Voltaire’s permanent store in Clapham
Labels: 2014, ashish gupta, Looking for Now
