(From top) Models show off outfits from the Metro Section line at Karma in Delhi; Namrata Joshipura

The metropolitan woman sits pretty and poised in Namrata Joshipura’s Spring-Summer collection for the Wills India Fashion Week. And the New York-based fashion designer always remembers the moment her collection, The Metro Section came to be conceived.

“I was in a subway headed for a business meeting when I was making notes for my buyer. I suddenly realised that I had to buy food for my baby daughter and I thought of how the working woman has to take care of everything. As I looked up, my eyes fell on a guy across me who was reading The New York Times. The words ‘Metro Section’ leapt out. And I thought that is exactly what women do — we lead a Metro Section existence,” says Joshipura.

The look accordingly is not sexy, but an effortless, ‘no-fuss’ one with dropped waists, below-the-knee hemlines, ribbed hems, skinny pants, pleated skirts, shorts, leather strips on chiffon and cocoon jackets. The colour palette moves from neutrals such as smoke (grey), mushroom and dirty lime to deeper tones of cognac, pink, old rose, coral and teal on chiffons, soft silks and light--weight brocades.

She says it’s a look that balances out the masculine environment, in which a woman works, with her innate femininity. “When you are at work, you are almost in a masculine existence, but you balance it out by being a woman. It is all about effortless clothing — it is not that you spend two hours trying to put a look together. It is quick,” she says with a snap of her fingers. “So here I offer you a collection and there you put the pieces together in a style that suits you. Though my clothes are not overtly sexy, when you wear them, I want you to feel sexy.”

If there’s a global appeal with the criss-cross low necklines or the unfinished edges of her clothes, it’s a sensibility that Joshipura has acquired from her experience in the Big Apple. A graduate from NIFT, she set up her own label ‘Namrata Joshipura’ in 1996 after having trained with designer Suneet Verma.

Her Army background, the Gujarati designer says, probably helped her out in her career. “My father was in the Army and I grew up between Pune and Delhi. And I have that certain discipline which comes from an Army life. It has helped me adapt myself to different situations,” she enthuses.

In the year 2000, she married Vivek Sood, business head of an apparel company, and shifted base to New York. It was the turning point in her life what with marriage and finding her feet in a foreign land. “But my husband is like a Buddha. He is so calm that he completely balances me out,” she laughs.

But it was a period that was fraught with struggle — a struggle to prove herself in a vibrant market where designers come and go, often without leaving a trace.

“When I started, I had to deal with getting an agent, setting up a retail network, getting people to understand my work, my line and my sensibility. It was about sustaining yourself and taking part in the market weeks, which are so expensive. It was difficult to get people there to understand that India does not just produce mass market clothing, but it does quality designer clothing as well,” says Joshipura. “It was a humbling experience.”

The label in the States, though, is known simply as ‘Joshipura’. “You see, my name gets distorted like anything. I didn’t want to do that to my name,” she laughs. At the moment, she sells to over 80 specialty stores in the US, including well-known names like Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel.

But the year she left for New York was also the year Fashion Week kicked off in India. The designer, however, was content to build the line in the West. She elaborates, “And that’s what I did. When I felt that the work in US could take care of itself and the time was right to show in India, I showed my first collection here two years ago.”

“India is ripe — there’s a retail explosion here at the moment. This is going to be my third year in the Fashion Week that has opened a whole world of stores for me. It is a one-stop shop. Without doing a show separately, I can meet buyers from all over the world at the venue itself, who buy for the next six months and leave. It is great for me because I don’t live here,” she adds.

Considering that Joshipura’s main focus in participating in the fashion week in India was to get her label “up and about”, she has certainly achieved it. Today she has opened her own stores in the Crescent (Delhi) and The Courtyard (Mumbai), while her retail points are Evoluzione (Chennai), Elahe (Hyderabad), Amara, Aza and Ogaan (Mumbai) and Ensemble (Delhi, Mumbai), Xenon, Espee and 85 Lansdowne (Calcutta).

Plus she has tapped the Middle East, an uncharted territory with her so far. So she has added Dubai, Turkey and Kuwait to the list of places she sells in. “So I am covered,” she says.

What really sets her apart? The essence of her appeal is a “global sensibility”, which she explains as a deft balancing of the Indian love for details, textures, embroideries and surface treatments along with contemporary styling and neat lines.

And while her heart is in New York, the 35-year-old nicknamed ‘Chubby’ by friends, makes sure that her collections are sourced and made in India. So there are frequent trips between India and New York, during which she has the company of Ananya, her 18-month-old daughter who travels with her whenever she packs her bags. “This is already her sixth trip to India. Motherhood more than anything has brought me close to nature and to reality. I think my design sensibility has a certain sensitivity that was not tapped so far,” Namrata signs off.

Photographs by Jagan Negi