.png)
Anamika Khanna at the Blenders Pride Fashion Tour Finale in Kolkata
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 13 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The last show of the Blenders Pride Fashion Tour did not take place inside a hall, or even on land. It unfolded on the Hooghly, with a barge anchored mid-river and the Howrah Bridge watching from behind, unchanged and unmoved. In that setting, Anamika Khanna presented an AK|OK collection that did not ask to be admired as craft in the traditional sense, but as something in the process of becoming.
From the start, it was clear this was not about preserving technique in its familiar form. Zardozi, chikankari, and mirror work were present, but not in the way the audience has been trained to expect them. They appeared broken up, shifted, pulled into sharper silhouettes, sometimes flattened, sometimes hardened with metallic finishes. Craft here felt less ornamental and more structural, less about surface and more about tension.
The choice of location mattered. A barge in the middle of a working river does not allow comfort. Models emerged from scaffolding, from shadows, from movement, rather than from backstage. Divers surfaced from the water before the first looks appeared, setting the tone early. This was not a gentle opening. The collection entered in fragments, and it stayed that way.
Chainmail became one of the most striking elements of the show, not as costume or armour, but as repetition. Worn collectively, it carried weight. The pieces felt deliberate and restrained, strong without being theatrical. As the show progressed, those rigid forms gave way to more fluid silhouettes, garments that moved with the body rather than against it, creating a visible shift from containment to release.
AK|OK has always allowed Khanna more room to experiment, and that freedom was visible here. The clothes were not overtly gendered. They did not lean heavily into nostalgia. Instead, they sat somewhere between familiarity and discomfort, recognisable in technique but unfamiliar in execution. Metallic interventions, sharp tailoring, and graphic elements pushed the work away from heritage dressing and closer to a global, contemporary vocabulary.
The pacing of the show mirrored the clothes. Light, smoke, and sound changed subtly as the collection unfolded, never overpowering the garments, but never disappearing either. By the time the finale arrived, with the Howrah Bridge fully illuminated behind the barge, the setting had become part of the collection rather than its backdrop.
What stayed with the audience was not a single look, but a mood. A sense that craft, when removed from reverence, becomes more flexible. Less precious. More alive. The collection did not explain itself. It did not attempt to resolve tradition and modernity neatly. It allowed them to sit together, unresolved.
In Kolkata, Anamika Khanna did not present craft as memory. She showed it as material — something that can still be bent, questioned, and pushed forward.
You May Also Like
Comments