Supriya Lele (Self) (Q7965)
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Supriya Lele (Self) is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Supriya Lele (Self) |
Supriya Lele (Self) is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Supriya Lele is one of those designers who’ve got into the rhythm of showing one season, and doing a lookbook next. Last time, she sent out something of a spectacular at the Barbican—a bold underlining of the delineation of her brief, draped sexy co-ordinates which succeed in blurring the distinctions between clothes, swimwear and lingerie. That was the Supriya Lele woman sorted out with a wardrobe for summer. For fall, the lookbook season, it was off to talk to the designer where she works.“I would say this season feels a lot more refined and elevated,” she said, by way of greeting. “And there are a lot more simpler things happening. Which I really love. It’s sort of finding pleasure in simplicity—small things like color, or just cut.” ‘Simple’ may not perhaps be the term that immediately springs to mind when you’re looking at a pair of cutaway black leather underpants, tightly belted at the waist, being worn with a black leather shirt with a pie-frill collar. Yet body-exposure is a positive choice that Lele and her sister generation of young female designers have normalized, and she has an audience for it.Lele’s photos evoke something of the locality—an ex-pharmacy, with a busy Bermondsey street glimpsed outside and a corner pub over the road. Upstairs in a ramshackle converted office building is Lele’s studio. It’s one snapshot of the young creativity that springs up through the London cracks, as it has always done—a factor which doesn’t detract from the quality of what she’s doing.“I started thinking about what I was actually wearing,” Lele said. “Every day, I’ve been wearing this baseball coat and slim jeans. And so we started by working into this idea with a really nice kind of leather piece.” It turned out as an over-the-head leather hoodie. The slim jeans part became fine-gauge leggings. “Then obviously, we started exploring the draping that I love to do so much, which I think has now become sort of more of a signature of mine. I wanted to create fabrics that looked wet, almost iridescent.”One dress—a white paisley lace, hand-foiled with pearlized paint ever so subtly underlined Lele’s Indian heritage. Others in gold, or cobalt blue, looked like photographic gels. Up close, on this appointment, it was also possible to see the quality of the fine gold and silver knitwear pieces Lele has been working on. Skimpy, but with fashion substance.
23 February 2024
Supriya Lele’s return to the runway for the first time in two years was well worth the wait. No matter that the runway was a carpark, the wattage her collection generated was quite sensational. “We were looking at Bruce Weber, Indian goddesses, and kind of Indian uncle tanks,” she said as her models were lining up.The “Indian uncle” turned out to be a white ribbed singlet grown into a bodysuit—a garment that defies categorization, as is typical of Lele’s work. Is it an under-garment, a swimsuit or something just meant to hang out in? The answer’s probably all three, because Lele’s design busts the boundaries between lingerie, swimwear, and ready-to-wear, and her following loves her for it.With time and experience she’s perfected ways to drape and fit and layer her pieces so that everything stays in place and looks classy. This is the avant garde movement around celebrating the female body she began developing well before the pandemic.Now she’s added more strings to her bow: lacy knitwear dresses, leather corset-bras “transforming the sari blouse from its colonial origins,” as her notes put it, and beautiful slim shoulder-bags amongst them. Close up, they have the kind of delicate placement of detail that’s typically a Lele touch—a line of “little Indian brass charms we 3-d printed—the shapes are basically from statues of classical Indian sculpture.”Halfway through the lineup was a look Lele pointed to, laughingly, as a kind of self-portrait. “These trousers are kind of like Indian shalwar kameez pants, but also a bit of old ’80s-style at the same time. And she’s got a black leather jacket. That’s how I see myself.”Walking the talk and wearing the looks is a creative power that women designers have. As daring as Lele’s brand seems, it’s working because it’s a functioning proposition that has all the angles meticulously test-driven by the designer herself.
19 September 2023
There’s a sense that Supriya Lele has properly found her stride now—a confidence that comes from knowing she has the enthusiasm of friends behind her. A good sprinkling of that sisterhood was at the Belvoir Castle wedding of Tish Weinstock and Tom Guinness on Halloween weekend. “The dress code was black tie gothic. It was fun,” the designer said. She made her own dress for the occasion—long, black, with tiny side-ties, a fishnet under-dress, and a back twisted to reveal skin.There’s a shorter version in her spring lookbook. As she points out, the ties are there to adjust, according to how daring, or not, the owner might be feeling. There are a lot of those sorts of devices—adjustable apron dresses, tied halter-neck bodysuits, and ‘layering pieces’ going on in her design. “Working with sheer fabrics is a challenging thing,” she rightly observes. “They have little layers of linings and slips underneath, so you don’t have to show too much.”Lele’s handling of the finer points of skimpy dressing is an obvious cause of her growing popularity. Body-display is ragingly fashionable now, and likely to hit further heights by the time people like Lele’s friends will be migrating to Mediterranean resorts next year. What sets her style apart from her London contemporaries Nensi Dojaka and Charlotte Knowles are the elements of print and drape she connects with her Indian heritage.She pointed out the block-prints on the cotton shirting in the collection: “It’s done in India, in Madhya Pradesh, my family’s region.” The fishnet pieces—including the improbable but certainly Instagrammable luxury of boot-cut leggings—are also “embroidered with tiny sequins, in India.”Lele’s natural bent has always been to slip in a modernist approach to the tradition of sari-draping and bra-tops, not that it will ever read literally. This season, her shirts come with ribbony tails that are designed to make the garments knottable in a playful way, a complement to her adjustable jersey bodysuits—or is it swimwear? Multiple choice staves off summer fashion boredom, at any rate. “It looks very simple but it’s not, of course,” Lele smiled serenely.
4 November 2022
Supriya Lele is one of the young leaders of the re-mapping of the female body in fashion. She was one of the first to suggest, design-wise, that showing the top of a hip or a slice of lower belly is something girls might want to do. How right her female-gaze suggestion was: Revealing bits of the anatomy their mothers would never have never have dared is now quite normalized.Lele knew she was really onto something during the pandemic, when orders for her well-cut, low-cut trousers with thong-like side straps started to spike. Look 15 in her runway show—pimento-red pants with a brown taffeta one-shouldered, cropped top proved how very good she’s become at honing and owning this look until it’s become on-point chic.This season she also made sure that her talent for swathing and asymmetically tying stretch georgette tops and satin, hip-riding pelmet skirts is something viable for all women. Paloma Elsser (who has probably been the most in-demand model at London Fashion Week) aided and abetted her point, along with a couple more women who broke Lele’s former over-reliance on mono-sized casting.The fall show also made her step up her outerwear, with excellently cool-looking funnel-necked jackets and coats in leather. Lele has a great eye for color and a clever instinct for knowing where her peers want to go with fashion. This collection raised the potential of her brand to the next level.
22 February 2022
It’s official: the great body reveal of 2021 has arrived, and that wave is going to hit even bigger by next summer. Supriya Lele’s show said it; so did Nensi Dojaka and Charlotte Knowles. In London, the new trend for strappy, cutaway semi-sheer methods of arranging fabric on bodies is noticeably directed by young women for young women. Lele said it became rooted—in sales—at exactly the time when no one could leave her house. “We had such a huge increase in personal customers during lockdown that I’m feeling really positive,” she smiled backstage. “So I really wanted to push it this season.”What her direct sale customers have been after are more of her dresses, a particular top with a keyhole cut-out, and her figure-hugging pants with a faux thong strand implanted on one hip. “We work so hard on cut,” she said. “We tweak it, develop it each season. It’s difficult to get a well-cut trouser.”Serendipitously for Lele, her comeback to the runway is in a summer season in which she could give full rein to her gift for draping and asymmetric cutouts, finely-stranded chiffon ribbon details, and asymmetric shapes in layered transparencies. Her first look captured the strength and sophistication that’s been a mark of her work: a dramatic deep brown ruched leather halter with a gathered keyhole, and a pair of sheer chiffon cuffed pants.Look closer, and you can detect the hints of Indian clothing that have been part of Lele’s body of work since at least 2017, when she showed her first presentation with Fashion East. So, those pants? “I suppose they’re a bit like Indian pajamas,” she said. Also present: the ruched bras and cropped tops from sari tradition which this British-born Indian talent has subtly wrapped into her way of designing.Like her sister London designers, Lele creates a space that blurs the distinctions between garments. A top is a bodysuit is a swimsuit. Underwear, outerwear—who’s counting any more? Lele means her women to be able to layer things their own ways. An outstanding piece was a sheer cotton mesh polo shirt with tiny sequins, made by embroiderers in India.There’s a generation that doesn’t need an instruction manual to know how to play with these kinds of clothes in their own ways. Still, it’s a pity that none of these three London-based female leaders with sexually confident ideas have yet to catch up with the wholly inclusive body positivity that the New York shows have normalized.
20 September 2021
There’s a curious resurgence of the early noughties currently sweeping through fashion: a collective yearning for a time which, through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia, appears far more alluring than the one we currently inhabit. “It’s just fun, isn’t it?” grins Supriya Lele. “It’s kind of sassy, but it’s tongue-in-cheek.” In the age of Instagram irony, Paris Hilton, low-slung waistbands, and knowingly naff prints are clearly resonating with a generation, but through the lens of Lele’s latest collection the visual signposts of the era adopt an elevated yet lo-fi twist.“I wanted it to feel colorful, sexy, confident—and quite ‘fashion,’ ” she explains of fall 2021, which draws on the pop culture tropes that the 33-year-old designer grew up surrounded by, refracted through the Helmut Lang–era minimalism that has long been her fixation. But unlike so much of Y2K’s original aesthetic (a wealth of Twitter commentary prompted by the Free Britney movement has clearly identified that era’s deeply troubling misogyny), the period is now seen through a distinctly female gaze. After all, “I’m a woman—and we know what feels good on our bodies,” she says. “Why would men know, and why would they get to decide? We get to decide what’s sexy for us.”That empowered, independent perspective is intrinsic to Lele’s work, and has resonated with a client base ranging from Dua Lipa to the jeweler Gaia Repossi and hair stylist Cyndia Harvey. Rather than being writ large on her designs, it materializes through the form-fitting drapery she instinctively models on the mannequins at her studio and the bodies of her all-female team, and which draws on her Indian heritage and appears determinedly flattering for a wealth of women.Last season, she opened up personal orders for her collection, and the response she has heard from her customers since has attested to the fact: “They say they can eat a roast dinner in the clothes and still feel good,” she beams (her flared trousers, two and a half years in development, have been a best-seller). “People say they didn’t realize how comfy they would be.”This season, bubblegum pastels drawn from Indian color palettes, and a paisley devoré which reimagines Madhya Pradesh florals as an early-noughties tribal tattoo print, became the foundations for cool, elegant pieces which quietly evoked Y2K. “I want to dress the woman who’s been there, done that—she has grown up and moved on, but that sentiment is still there a little bit,” she explained.
The introduction of knitwear—hand-crafted crochet (Lele’s assistant is a whiz, and taught her last year), or mohair knit turned into slinky dresses—indicated a gentle expansion of her offering, while the twisted keyhole halters, sheer jersey dresses, and ruched bralettes intrinsic to her brand aesthetic were regularly dressed down, or layered atop one another. “One of the girls on my team, she doesn’t dress so ‘sexy’—whatever that word means—so she’ll take something a little more revealing and wear it over a T-shirt,” Lele notes. “What’s most important to me is that I like these clothes, the girls in my team like these clothes, and my clients like these clothes.” They do, and this collection certainly won’t let them down.
19 March 2021
It’s late in the evening, the day before Supriya Lele is due to present her spring 2021 collection, and the 33-year-old British-Indian designer and her team are still in the London studio she refers to as her second home, eating the assortment of curries her mother has dropped off for dinner and finalizing looks for the collection. “Thank God,” she grins over Zoom. “I spent four months at home in my joggers, listening to Primal Scream and Brian Eno like a moody teenager who’d been locked in their room for months. I’m so happy to be back here with everyone, even if it is a Sunday night…”It was the gleeful enthusiasm she found in returning to work, combined with a lockdown soundtrack that harkened back to her heavy metal–obsessed youth, which informed her latest offering. A few months ago, Lele realized that when she and her team began to leave their houses again, they gradually started making more and more effort in the mornings: “We were all looking forward to getting dressed every day—and we wanted to feel good,” she recalls. “I was even wearing lower-cut tops. I wanted to feel hot again.”Due to COVID-19 restrictions, she found herself fitting clothes on herself and her all-female team—a range of women of different shapes and sizes—and so finding the fits to flatter everyone became of paramount importance: Enter adjustable necklines that can be pulled taut for more conservative impact, or the peekaboo underwear lines (a curious emergent trend) which might be tucked into low-rise trousers for the less adventurous wearer. “I wanted the sexiness to come through as confidence rather than something overt,” she reflects. “And for the clothes to be able to adapt to how you’re feeling.”But despite a dose of self-described optimism—the introduction of sequins and some standout brights—the lo-fi codes Lele has built over the course of her career remain at the core of her collection. Her ability to blend grunge-tinged nostalgia with a freshly minimalist take on the drapery of her Indian heritage is best embodied by a series of shrunken tops, tucked and cut to resemble well-worn band tees, and spray-painted by artist Will Bond with a traditional Indian graphic which ends up channeling Black Sabbath as much as Madhya Pradesh (applied to everything from duster coats to slit skirts, it became something of a seasonal motif).
A wispy madras check, bought at her grandmother’s favorite fabric store the last time Lele visited India, is turned into a micromini—and, paired with sequined shorts and a cropped cardigan, makes for the sort of outfit you can easily imagine a 15-year-old Lele wearing to watch Slayer.There remains an abundance of the tied and twisted transparencies that have become a staple of her work (and Instagram gold for the likes of Dua Lipa and Kendall Jenner), and enough noughties revivalism to ensure her appeal to a generation for whom that appears vintage. “Subversive sparkly attire for the grown-up metalhead,” she wrote in her show notes. There are plenty of her peers who’ll be enamored by the sentiment.
22 September 2020
Supriya Lele’s collection was a compendium of a seam of emerging trends sprung from a uniquely intersectional female viewpoint in London. Have a swipe through: Here, we see a new, concise, but sensual minimalism; the taste for black, for one-shoulder asymmetry, and the shadowy transparency that links her to a fresh matrix of energy on the rise across fashion.Lele’s fusion of traditional Indian dress with the specific sensibility of an English girl is part of a new wave of vitality surfacing through art schools into British fashion—the creative electricity inherent in the imaginations of second- and third-generation immigrants in the U.K. “It’s about being from two places, and not really knowing if you’re from here or there,” she said. “These ideas of these skeletons of your identity . . . the damping down of the identity you go through as a teenager—and then finding your confidence to grow into a woman and find yourself.”Her family memory of saris and the traditional bodices worn with them are concisely synthesized into her own experience as a fashion- and music-aware ’90s girl who was a teen metalhead. “I did architecture before I did fashion,” she said. “I was drawn to minimalism. I think I was shying away from my own culture—literally doing the opposite. I love Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, how amazing it was that they could do something so nuanced and clever with a little touch or gesture.”Her expression of the consciousness of an English girl with a foot in two cultures is subtle and sexy: A place where vestigial Lang-like harnesses are indivisible from the asymmetry and delicacy of South Asian dress and its underpinnings; where modern body-conscious stretch dresses echo Indian madras checks; where slit skirts and skin-baring wraparound crop tops signal hip sensuality and strength. “I bleached and distressed saris and overlaid them with sheer black fabric,” said Lele. “The lime green shorts, checked trousers—all the prints were from saris.”It was a slick black tailored rubber coat, fastened high, that opened the show, however. A flashback to Lele’s days as a Slayer and Black Sabbath fan, whose parents tolerated her days of thrashing a drum kit in her bedroom provided she kept up with her schoolwork. Which she certainly did—all the way to a master’s degree in fashion from the Royal College of Art, from whence she graduated in 2016.Identity and intersectionality are at the essential core of what makes fashion interesting and relevant today.
Yes, Lele stands with that generational band of like-minders who are putting minimalism back on the map this season. But her creative intelligence is just as importantly a culmination of Indian and British postcolonial heritage, which has never been manifested on a London runway from a female perspective until this moment. “I thought, How can I make a really nuanced version of it that I’ve never seen before?” she said. “It was important to me to show that you can do that.”
21 September 2019