Fashion Designer Bibhu Mohapatra was on hand as a mentor to students for SCAD Fashion Show 2013. He spoke with District on his career, influences and the advice he offers to students entering the highly competitive industry.
District: When did you decide that you wanted to be a fashion designer?
Bibhu Mohapatra: When I was in my early 20s, but I knew that I was interested in it when I was a very young child.
District: How did you get started?
Mohapatra: I was making things on my own, but I didn’t have any training. But finally, my mother taught me how to sew on a machine when I was like 12 or 13 years old and then I started cutting her old saris and started making things for my sister. And that’s how I pretty informally started. But the actual formal training happened when I came to New York, and I went to FIT and I started fashion design.
District: How do you begin your design process?
Mohapatra: A source of inspiration is key. I have to have one goal for every collection, and that goal can be anything, could be an object or person, a time in history … And once I find that goal and everything builds around it like a beehive, and it all kind of takes shape and form. And they’re all different. Every collection is different based on what’s happening around me and what inspires me on the street and what my travels inform me and what I read. So it’s a very organic process. Once I have my wall of inspiration, then I start to sketch and select fabric and make my color story and the collection is made.
District: What inspired you for your latest collection [from February]?
Mohapatra: There was a gallery show going on and an exhibition on Man Ray’s portraits at the Portrait Gallery in London and who doesn’t like Man Ray’s work? But for me, it was the study of his relationships with his muses that he photographed and who were often talented artists themselves, such as Lee Miller or Kiki de Montparnasse, and these are strong individuals who inspired Man Ray, and he tried to capture them through his eyes. And so that was my quest, to find and define the relationship between my muses and Man Ray’s muses and how his work kind of depicted who those muses are and I wanted to see if the same women were my muses and they were alive and wearing my clothes, for what they would be dressing as. So that was the whole idea behind the latest collection.
District: When you started out and first looked at his muses, did you have a single piece, or did you already have an entire collection of ideas in mind?
Mohapatra: These individuals who always inspired me, those iconic photographs, everyone knows about them, but in this context, it was like looking at something new. And so there are a couple of images and his techniques, Man Ray’s techniques, of exposing film and taking pictures, I was very curious about. So I did a lot of study on his techniques and his muses and his thought process.
District: How has your education [with a degree in economics] played a role in your career?
Mohapatra: Let’s just say, numbers don’t look like Greek to me. They make sense. It’s essential that as I build my business, besides doing the creative things, I also pay attention to the business side of it, and I can read a spreadsheet, and it will make sense to me. But I’m no genius in economics. I can assure you that. But it does help.
District: What advice would you give to this year’s graduating senior [fashion students]?
Mohapatra: It’s important to realize and acknowledge the fact that we all kind of get, you know, people who decide to go into that, it starts from inspiration and idea behind the creativity behind the whole process of fashion design, and the glamour behind it, and that’s what attracts. But really, in reality, in today’s day and time, the fashion designer understands the balance between creativity and commerce. The real business of fashion requires a vision that really is taught through every design process is somehow dealt with the ultimate consumer in mind. The fact that someone is actually going to be willing to wear it, and pay for it, and that’s the key. It’s always that delicate balance between creativity and business and the commerce side of it. These young designers, whether they work for someone else or they work for themselves, that they have to keep in mind.
When they step out of their comfort zone of designing in their little world of creativity, the fashion industry, it’s a major global industry, and people have information really fast and people are very exposed to what’s happening around them, so they know exactly what their choices are, so it’s very competitive. Anytime one designs something, they have to know who their target customer is and how they can appeal to them. At that point, it becomes less about the designer, and it becomes more about the ultimate consumer. That’s the key to a successful fashion business.
District: In this huge global market that is so competitive, what direction do you see it going in the next five years or so?
Mohapatra: I think it all goes back to people’s lifestyles and what they’re doing. It’s so fast now, the decisions are made much quicker, the communication happens much quicker, the information goes out, if someone shows something in Belgium, it’s already being shown in India, thanks to technology. And so the process becomes really fast. It’s very different from earlier, 30 years ago or 40 years ago, the process took longer time, and people had more time to think about and really decide what they want to wear and it was very original. Europe was separate. America was separate, Asia was very different. And now everyone travels, people migrate and people move around all over the world, and so the old rules of demographics and geographical boundaries don’t apply anymore.
I think fashion, as a business, has become more and more dynamic, more competitive. That’s the most exciting part about it, that keeps the designers on their toes. The pressure is also a lot more because you always have to say something new because there are plenty of organizations who are happy to borrow original ideas from other people. That’s the downside of having the easy access to information.
As a designer, I can only speak for myself, I don’t follow trends, I believe in saying something unusual, something that is 200 percent of my own, and I do have to make sure what I say and what I do is completely, entirely mine. It’s not only once a year, I have to do it 4 and 5 times a year, with these collections. That is going to get even more rapid. Time is very limited, and people have to make decisions very quickly, so the product has to be that appealing so that when she browses through a rack, she doesn’t have time to think. It should speak to her instantly, well enough that she picks it up, pays for it and walks out of the store.
