Masaba Gupta’s quirky prints shake up Indian fashion

She’s already a leading name in Indian fashion, with customers ranging from top Bollywood stars to teenage girls on pocket money.

Yet, 25-year-old Masaba Gupta — best-known for her quirky cow and camera prints that adorn saris, dresses and even smartphone covers — puts much of her whirlwind success down to intuition.

“My gut just somehow tells me that this is going to be the next big thing. Luckily, I know it before anyone else does,” she said at her flagship Masaba store in Mumbai’s suburb of Juhu.

The daughter of West Indies cricket legend Viv Richards and Bollywood actress Neena Gupta — who shared a relationship in the 1980s — the young designer said many people “write me off as a product of my parents and social media”, but her clothes appear to be challenging the critics.

Alongside the success of her eponymous brand, Gupta was in 2012 appointed the youngest creative director for ethnic wear label Satya Paul — a rare move in the world of Indian fashion houses, which tend not to hire big outside names.

Unconventional prints

From lipstick patterns to the Tamil script, her unconventional trademark prints have proved so popular that counterfeits have entered the market, spurring her to set up the more affordable Masaba Lite line for teenagers.

It is an impressive CV for someone who stumbled into fashion because no other college courses were still open — “I had nothing else to do,” said Gupta, dressed in high-street culottes and gold sandals.

Attending catwalk shows as a student, she found Indian fashion “was running at this really slow, stale pace” with an evident gap in the market.

“I felt like everybody was doing bridal, there was no such thing as ‘pret’ — ready-to-wear was just not something that you heard of,” said Gupta, who officially opened the winter edition of Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai on Tuesday by displaying one of her collections.

Link –

Masaba Gupta’s quirky prints shake up Indian fashion