Supriya Lele's Delicate View Of A New India

British-Indian designer Supriya Lele inhabits the space between her familial roots in Jabalpur and her life growing up in the UK’s West Midlands. And in her clothes, she fashions this push and pull that lives within her. As a result, what is born is not a dissonance but a delicate view of a new India, finds Akanksha Kamath

- Akanksha Kamath

Supriya Lele’s sinuous sheer pieces that wrap across the body, revealing hip, bone, curve and crevice, are a measure in contrast. It’s the kind of clothing that can reveal too much yet too little all at once. When Lele and I connect over Zoom, it is a week after her first Vogue India cover shoot, where photographer Dan Jackson, stylist Kate Phelan and model-activist Zinnia Kumar uncover new perspectives in the designer’s colour-coded clothes.

Today, five years after starting her label in London, what stands out about the Royal College of Art alumna and her oeuvre of whisper-thin organza pieces is the focused female gaze she brings to the industry. Case in point: the slinkiest pieces from her spring/summer 2022 collection which she has handpicked for this cover shoot she co-created. “Sexy…” she says, letting the word linger, before continuing, “is so subjective. Confidence is sexy. Attitude, vibe and spirit can all be sexy.” It is serendipitous then, that the subject for her brave clothing is modern multi-hyphenate and fellow South Asian Zinnia Kumar.