When I graduated from Pearl Academy of Fashion in 2001, I had bagged the ‘Best Innovative Collection Award’ at the graduating show. I have always thought and designed differently. It was this desire to do things differently that inspired me to come out with a different collection, experiment with fabric and embellishments. I also felt that there is a gap in the Indian fashion market as far as alternative fashion options were concerned, so I came up with VintageGoth. It’s a two-week ‘fresh’ brand.

I have used unusual fabrics coupled with the designs to make my collection a perfect alternate fashion offering. We’ve used lot of jute, cotton, metallic embellishments, metal with brocade and leather. But it was not easy to use them. The challenge was the non-availability of machines in the market. The machines that we had did not support unconventional fabrics and we had to spend considerable amount of time on R&D for these machines. Training our workers was another challenge.

As told to Reenu Bahl