Dream Team

Jeweller Siddharth Kasliwal and fashion designer Marie-Anne Oudejans’s serendipitous—and very successful— professional partnership taps into the very best of each of them.

- Sunil Sethi

Like the Chekhov tale of a woman with a little dog, many in Jaipur recall the arrival of Dutch-born fashion designer Marie Anne Oudejans a few years ago as the woman with a dog trailing her heels everywhere. That is how Siddharth Kasliwal, scion of the generations-old dynasty of purveyors of fine gemstones and jewellery at their famous flagship store Gem Palace, remembers his first glimpse of Oudejans.

That was April 2015. The dashing 34-year-old Kasliwal, once voted among the world’s 50 most eligible bachelors along with Tesla’s Elon Musk, has reason to remember the moment. Oudejans had taken the Pink City by storm with the panache of her sumptuous Indo-European interiors for Bar Palladio and its tented outdoor canopies in the grounds of Narain Niwas Palace hotel. And Kasliwal was at a turning point in his life.

His father, the charismatic Munnu Kasliwal, credited with giving Jaipur’s lapidarists an international standing, had died three years earlier, leaving the family bereft. “I wanted to carry forward my father’s legacy, but in new ways, and in new directions,” he says.

To this end, he took two floors in Dhanraj Mahal in south Mumbai for a showroom. But the interiors weren’t working out. “What I was getting was a modernist MumbaiNew York look…what I wanted was the glamour and intimacy of a Paris-Jaipur salon.”