Scenes from the ramp at the Linen Club fashion show at Fusion. Pictures by Rashbehari Das

Linen, the most-talked-about fabric of the moment, is increasingly finding favour with fashionistas as well as the design brigade.

Rohit Bal, brand ambassador of Linen Club, and other designers like Raghuvendra Rathore, Kiran Uttam Ghosh and JJ Valaya have been experimenting with linen for sometime now, but the fabric is being presented in a completely new avatar this season by Italian designers Mario Talli Mencioni and Raffaella Palmieri.

Working for Linen Club, from the stable of Indian Rayon and Industries Ltd, the designers have dished out fare for the new festive collection of the brand that was unveiled in the city on Wednesday night.

“Linen is new to India, but it has been making its presence felt in the global market for quite some time. Designers and manufacturers in Europe have been using various new techniques to develop new weaves in linen. We hired these two Italian designers for their valuable inputs in this regard,” said Abhey Nair, senior vice-president of Indian Rayon and Industries.

Both the designers, revealed Nair, are experts in this particular fabric. “Mario is the ex-president of Master of Linen, an European body of manufacturers,” he added.

The inputs from these designers have not only shaped this collection, they have also helped in deciding colours and textures for the brand till summer 2007. “The designers have really helped us with forecasting. Since they are much more aware of international trends and forecasts, they have been able to predict the colour and textures that will be in vogue even as far as the summer of 2007,” explained Nair.

Precision in work, an eye for detail and the art of presentation are bonuses Mario and Raeffaella brought to the Linen Club table. “We came up with certain new weaves that we have never done before. And that has been possible because of the European technologies they introduced,” said Nair.

Over 3,000 fabric designs created by Jaya Shree Textiles, manufacturers of Linen Club, for the collection have been handed out to designers, retailers and manufacturers all over the country. The collection was unveiled at Fusion, Golden Park, with a fashion show featuring creations of designers Komal Sood and Soumitra, using Linen Club fabric.

Models Amrita, Sudipta, Sreshtha, Tanusree, Sejuti, Tina, Sonali, Neeraj and Sourav among others catwalked on the dance floor of the night club in creations by the two designers. The silhouettes were mostly western ? skirts of various shapes and sizes, tops, ankle-length trousers, shirts, peddle-pushers ? with occasional churidar kurta for both men and women. While Soumitra’s colours were mostly muted ? he opened the show with a pristine white line and silver embellishments, Komal had a few brighter hues up her sleeve. While the weaves were the mainstay of most lines, there were some vibrant floral prints and colourful stripes as well.

Performances by a dance troupe that grooved to popular Hindi numbers punctuated the fashion show choreographed by Debarun Mukherjee.