Tribute | India’s most famous couturier Rohit Bal lived by his heart and died by it

The project you might have been dreading for a 12 months is right here. Couturier Rohit Bal’s obituary. He died on Diwali, November 1, 2024, at 63. His mortal stays — buried beneath flowers at Delhi’s Lodhi Crematorium with the face laid naked for final respects earlier than the pyre was lit — seemed irrevocably frozen in time. Love and loss of life pulsed within the air. The palpable love of his household and buddies, provoked into exultation by the Grim Reaper’s arrival.

Deep down, you had apprehensive for a few years that you’ll have to jot down this, except you give up the fulltime job of residing, earlier than the style trade’s beloved Gudda, who had been ailing. Let me say this then, tremulous as I really feel about its (in)correctness, that I had lengthy questioned if Bal had a loss of life want. That his ardour for all times, for merriment, delicate sentient connects, generally with warning thrown to the winds, was how he needed it to be. It will be untrue to his philosophic stoicism to say he didn’t know the results.

Life is deadly anyway and this isn’t about Bal’s private indulgences, speculations of which over the past three a long time eclipsed some dimensions of his design work. Our collective engrossment along with his crowd-pulling persona, glossed over the empath that he was.

This obit is about that empath — naturally outfitted for vogue’s glamour and grease, his sensitivity his curse.

Making of the empath

I’ve a fuzzy reminiscence of my first correct assembly with Rohit ‘Gudda’ Bal as I referred to as him. ‘Rohit’ sounded tepid, along with his golden hair, blue eyes and rosy skinned character, outfitted in velvet jackets with embroidered motifs. ‘Bal’ was relatively Beta and he was visibly Alpha. ‘Gudda’, his pet identify, was apt. However I didn’t need to be a groupie. The three names collectively felt proper. These impressions return to 2007, on the first version of Marie Claire Made in India awards when he sauntered in flanked by mannequin buddies, to obtain the Designer of the 12 months trophy. I used to be then the primary editor of Marie Claire India.

Ornamental gold-bronze jacket, cream jodhpurs, lengthy hair, and half a crinkling smile, served the appropriate mix of self-importance and self-awareness. He liked being the centre of consideration in these days. By the point the night wore out, Bal was dancing along with his younger male buddies, excessive on adrenaline.

That depth bled into his work, too. His artisanal aesthetic sparkled in his couture. Spectacular vogue exhibits would finish with Bal dancing on the ramp, after flowing anarkalis fluted on the edges, horny cholis, lengthy slit jackets styled over crushed ombre skirts, flower-bedecked clothes, quilted jackets, boleros, capes, kurtas, tunics and embellished males’s sherwanis had walked out. Jodhpurs, too. Actor Arjun Rampal, Bal’s rumoured boyfriend as soon as upon a time, wore these with flamboyance when he would return as showstopper for his good friend. Bal mentioned he liked Rampal. “He’s my brother,” he mentioned to me merely in a recorded interview.

Actor Arjun Rampal and designer Rohit Bal at India Couture Week 2017 in New Delhi.
| Photograph Credit score:
Getty Pictures

Cloth of life

Mulmul, khadi, velvet can be the main metaphors from Bal’s cloth oeuvre. “The humility of khadi touches me. Cream has an intrinsic purity, the innocence of Tabula Rasa,” he mentioned. The lotus was his lingering muse, a flower that symbolised his interior area. “The humility of the lotus, which blooms in swamps, and the self-importance of the peacock have been the 2 extremely spectacular reverse types I’ve been drawn to all my life,” he would say. Imperceptibly generally, Bal was lotus and peacock himself. That ebullient allure was a double-edged sword — it distracted from his achievements, a lot because it toned down vital assessments of his designs. In spite of everything, he wasn’t simply “evolving” as a designer. There was many a stumble.

Rohit Bal on the launch of his residence collectibles and attire line in Mumbai, 2016.
| Photograph Credit score:
Getty Pictures

For a chapter titled ‘Raja and Yuvraj’ (couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the latter), in my ebook Powder Room (2012), Bal invited me to his Noida workshop. This was in 2011. He had observed Sabyasachi’s work and credited him with originality, a praise Bal reluctantly endowed on most others. From the studio, we drove collectively in his luxurious automotive to his residence in Delhi’s Defence Colony. He sat within the entrance alongside the driving force and I, within the monumental again seat, corseted by pressure over our first “candid” interview. Defences got here down steadily and the credit score goes to Duffy, Bal’s pet canine, a Boxer whose full identify was Duffer.

A 13-year-long alternate was seeded that night. About design, plagiarism, mediocrity in Indian vogue, the obsessive pursuit of celebrities, the media’s sensationalist tales about Bal’s private life, the quotes he by no means gave however bought attributed to him. He defined why he had begun to float away from journalists, casting his boundaries, seldom responding to calls from reporters.

These exchanges had been rare. Some on WhatsApp, some in individual. Generally at his shops, as soon as at Lodhi Resort the place he shot with The Voice of Style crew for the Diwali 2021 version. For the duvet, he needed to put on both Shahab Durazi or Rajesh Pratap Singh, none different.

Sundown was Bal’s most popular hour for chats like these, with lights muted. One night, seated as he was on a blue velvet couch in his menswear retailer in Delhi, warmed by mellow lighting, I discovered him a ponderous man with an aristocratic aura. Extra Dasharath than Ram. Extra Homer, in plundering depth, not the wandering Odysseus. An Afghani warfare lord even on a cushioned seat.

Rohit Bal in a ‘ghaghra’ for {a magazine} shoot in 2017.
| Photograph Credit score:
Getty Pictures

Over time, he gave me just a few unique interviews, as soon as agreeing to talk about his relationships for a canopy story for HT Brunch. He wasn’t on the lookout for romantic companions who may recite the Bhagwad Gita backwards and mentioned that love didn’t must eat with a spoon and fork. “I’ve all the time needed a steadiness between brawn and mind.” He wore a crinkled ghaghra for the duvet — amongst his most memorable photographs.

The exclusives I bought had been by no means breaking information about his collaborations with Jabong, Usha Silai, Linen Membership, Khadi India, Biba, Bombay Dyeing, Titan Nebula, Zippo Lighters, Indian Roots, Sagrados Luxurious Villas in Goa, and lots of others, of which some had been snuffed out earlier than later. As an alternative, they had been reflective exclusives. Presumably, as a designer, he was eager to be understood with out being lined by controversies, whereas I needed to get previous that very wanting glass. Earnest as Alice.

Rohit Bal with the luxurious watches he designed for Titan in 2003.
| Photograph Credit score:
G.P. Sampath Kumar

Bal’s rising fatigue for fame, the important disregard Indians had for vogue, and the pull of reclusiveness started to crop up as evolving life motifs. “My disco duck days are over,” he mentioned.

However that will come later.

Earlier than the lights dimmed

“I greater than match the invoice of Indian vogue’s poster boy within the eighties. I had the seems, knew find out how to costume, spoke effectively, I used to be ahead, loopy, liked, unloved, open to expertise, clever, I had the braveness to inform the world that I used to be homosexual. I stuffed all of the gaps,” he mentioned. He was speaking about his Kashmiri roots, St. Stephens schooling, his clever and liberal mindset. This was for Powder Room. He had already had a coronary heart assault, which had turn out to be a much bigger dialogue level than his gorgeous assortment referred to as Shahaan-e-Khas for India Couture Week, impressed from Indian clothes in museums the world over. Between Siyahi (2007), Shararat (2010) and the most recent Kaynaat this October, the place a fragile and frail Bal took a final dancing bow at Delhi’s Imperial resort, there was loads occurring in his design studio.

Rohit Bal with actor Ananya Pandey at Lakme Style Week, October 2024.
| Photograph Credit score:
PTI

But, from merrymaking to a seek for reclusiveness, propelled by sickness and hereditary cardiac points, it was not a decimation of the artist. Quite, it was the quick burn of a too-bright candle. His heady methods, too fervent passions, after events, the depth of relationships each romantic and familial, non secular realisations and his gentility, which is the very essence of Kashmiriyat, had been taking a toll.

Style metabolised Bal’s life expertise. However whereas that was all he would do, together with a Bal Bache line for youngsters in 2021, he was now not captive to vogue. He was free, if heavy-hearted.

“I’ve been extraordinarily delicate to private auras proper from once I was a baby. I’m caring, emotional and delicate. Whether or not that gentility has one thing to do with a sure sexual orientation, I don’t know,” he mentioned throughout the HT Brunch interview, seven years in the past, confessing to his “mad, passionate, Devdas-like” self in love and loss.

Shifting phrases spoken from a coronary heart that was in all probability beating retreat.

The author is editor-in-chief of ‘The Voice of Style’.