Slow Designing With James Ferreira

For the veteran designer, fashion was never about feeding the carnal instincts of commerce and seasonality. It always had to be rooted in personal history and working with the Indian story, finds Arman Khan

- Arman Khan

The last time I met James Ferreira earlier this year, we were navigating the mechanics of a coffee percolator in the absence of his domestic worker. It was a balmy Sunday afternoon, the heat rising in waves off the vividly coloured façades of the houses of Khotachiwadi, the east Indian neighbourhood in Girgaon, Mumbai, that held everything from the wafting aroma of chicken stew to the stately bottle masala.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t pretend to like black coffee, and my friends, who are coffee fanatics and purists, hate me for it. What can I say? I like my coffee with sugar and a side of milk, the old-school way,” he had confessed as we tried to make sense of the contraption.

Now, as I make my way to Ferreira House for this article, the mystery of the coffee percolator has been resolved. All it took was a gimble-looking rod that had to be cranked for the beans to be uniformly coaxed. Ferreira, though, is anything but uniform. Over the past few years, most of the attention he commands rests in his capacity as a purveyor and a custodian of sorts of Khotachiwadi. Some credit him for singularly putting the neighbourhood back on the art and culture map of the maximum city and beyond.

While visitors take Instagram-worthy pictures of the façades and the shell of a deciduous tree in his verandah, he is busy at work, sewing on a century-old wooden table framed by his parent’s sepia-tinted pictures, stitching, draping. Amidst all the Khotachiwadi-focused attention, there remains a central question: have we perhaps lost track of James Ferreira, the designer, the master couturier?

MECHANICS OF CLOTH