Fantasy jungle comes alive at India Fashion Week

New Delhi, Mar 21: Mythical creatures descended on the catwalk at India`s premier fashion event as maverick designer Manish Arora unveiled a fantasy jungle with crystal peacocks and flying dolphins.

Prints of giraffes, lions, caterpillars and bizarre insects were woven into knee-length jackets, form-fitting dresses, trousers and short skirts for models with painted faces and hair decked up like a pair of horns. "The idea is to take a theme which is as common as a circus or a jungle but put your fantasy in it and show to the world what`s in your mind,” said Arora, who also wowed audiences last year with a circus-themed collection. The designer embellished silk satin, velvet and leather with hand-embroidered three-dimensional motifs and Swarovski crystals to breathe life into black, brown and green animals for his show on Friday, day three of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week. The autumn/winter collection included mechanical `bird` head-gear with flapping wings and a bizarre full-length dress that had multi-hued flowers protruding from all sides. "I tried to take it (the theme of the collection) to another level with my imagination," Arora said. Earlier, a socially-conscious Raghavendra Rathore showed a collection inspired by the changing political, and social landscape of India, with marked reference to the rise of the Third Front in politics and the global economic meltdown. Much of the khadi-derived collection was in black with the clothes cut at waist-level on one side to emphasise the left. "The concept was left-handed people, the left-handedness of society….everything is moving to the left," Rathore said. Bureau Report