From exquisite watches featuring Raja Ravi Varma art to Rimzim Dadu, Vikram Goyal’s designs, award-winning liquor Camikara, check out BT Magazine’s pick of Indian luxury | In Pics
Photos and Text by: Bandeep Singh
Crème de la crème: Indian Luxury Top Picks
From exquisite watches featuring Raja Ravi Varma art to award-winning liquor Camikara, here is Business Today Magazine’s pick of Indian luxury in its latest Luxury Issue
Best in Indian luxury: Absynthe Design Hummingbird Brooch
The sheer iridescent brilliance of Abhisek Basak’s Absynthe Design Hummingbird Brooch will just grab your attention. Look closer, and what you’ll marvel at is its construction—with about 120 antique watch parts like the circular wheels, serrated gears, tiny springs and coils—forming the intricate body of the bird. It is an ode to the biomechanics of the bird in flight, expressed in steampunk—a design genre that uses the visual language of industrial age mechanics “It is my dream of an alternate reality where prakriti, nature, goes hand in hand with pragati, [progress],” says the artist, who has been creating jewellery with antique watch parts since 2010
Absynthe Design Hummingbird Brooch Price
Abhisek Basak is relentless in his pursuit of “artistic transformation” of the object he is working on. In the brooch, for instance, the bioluminescent feathers have been created using the exoskeleton of specially bred tropical jewel beetles and each piece takes about a week to 10 days to finish. Priced at Rs 35,000 each, these hummingbirds are a steal, and are ready to fly away
Top Brass: Designer Vikram Goyal
Designer Vikram Goyal has an unusual relationship with brass. He sees it as a sheet of dense fabric that can be cut, hammered, or pressed into audacious designs. In October, the engineer-turned-designer showcased his work at the prestigious PAD contemporary art and design fair in London. The designer’s “pad” in India is a sprawling industrial space of museum-like proportions in Noida, where he fashions and displays his oeuvre. Amidst a medley of giant asymmetrical modernist sculptural forms and massive repoussage metal canvasses with mythical landscapes pressed onto them, lies ‘Radiate’, a set of three brass screens—nine ft high and 20 ft long
Best in Indian luxury: Metal artistry by Vikram Goyal
Inspired by the midnight sun in the polar regions, the screen set by designer Vikram Goyal is created with brass sheets cut into long curvilinear f lame-shaped strips that are given seam-like textures using brass deposit welding. These are then welded together to create a radiating blaze. They are stratified with a dense layering of strips into giant floral forms emerging within the blaze. The monochrome of metallic yellow is broken by Pietra dura inlays of red jasper and black portoro marble orbs. The piece, spread to its full length, is a showstopper—one that silences all conversations and starts another. Price on request
Sipping Gold: Camikara
In India, rum drinkers are cult worshippers of a monk from the hills. His words are strong and are imbibed with substantial dilution. What is remembered is not the message but the delirium. The idea of a rum so nuanced and layered in its flavours that it is sipped neat, like a single malt is delightful enough to be another deity of inebriation. Camikara by Piccadily Distilleries is an answer to the prayers of rum drinkers that have faced taste racism from other spirit worshippers. Unlike most rums that are prepared with sugarcane molasses, Camikara is made with pure cane juice, without any additives. It is a sipping rum aged in ex-bourbon, American oak barrels for 12 years. In that process, only 6.6 per cent of the original filled quantity is left to be savoured as the rest evaporates...
Camikara cane juice rum: Price
...What comes to the consumer is a one-of-a-kind luxury drink that is redolent with rich flavours hitherto not experienced in an Indian rum. On the nose, Camikara raises a bouquet of aromas—ginger, honey, and rich fruity notes with a hint of leather. A sip reveals smooth rich notes of dark chocolate, vanilla and fruity after notes with a finish of wood. Camikara received rare international recognition this year—it won the gold medal at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in London, a first for Indian rum. Of the 3,600 bottles, only 1,200 have been set aside for the Indian market, and each bottle is priced at Rs 6,200. Taken out of its custom silk-lined case, the rum pours out in a lustrous depiction of its name, which means liquid gold in Sanskrit
Time Honoured Tradition: Jaipur Watch Company
Iconic 19th century Indian painter and artist Raja Ravi Varma is one of the favourites of Indian art. From cinema, to textiles and fashion, calendar art, to kitschy handbags and popular art adaptations, every aspect has a sprinkling of the artist’s influence. Public interest in the artist and his acclaim as India’s first modernist painter has grown with time—this time quite literally. Jaipur Watch Company, which describes itself as India’s first bespoke watchmaker and the only Indian micro luxury watch brand, has launched a limited edition of 117 automatic watches with the dials bearing one of 14 different paintings of Raja Ravi Varma
Jaipur Watch Company: Raja Ravi Varma Collection price
Encased in a special grade stainless steel casing, the watch has a painting printed onto the inside sapphire crystal of the glass, like the one featuring ‘Radha in the moonlight’ by Raja Ravi Varma. Priced at Rs 65,000, each Jaipur Watch Company watch comes along with a signed letter from Rama Varma, a direct descendent of the Raja Ravi Varma, authenticating the painting and its use on the watch dial. On the wrist, the watch is not just an artwork, but a Rasa, an extract of Indian-ness announcing your distinct taste
(Wo)men’s wear: Designer Rimzim Dadu’s sculptural silhouettes
Indian menswear is mostly fashioned around the idea of ‘the complete man’. Between the very regal bandhgalas, the ornate sherwanis and the corporate sharp suits are the liminal spaces where even the complete man wants to put his hair down and party—wearing exuberance and not excess. Arguably the best outfits for that come from Rimzim Dadu, one of the edgiest Indian designers, known for her sculptural silhouettes created with unusually made textiles. Reputed for her women’s wear, Dadu has expressed her very powerful design language of unique textures and vivid metallic patinas, created by joining hair-thin (0.45 micron) steel wires, fusing it with conventional menswear like shirts, tuxedos, formal suits, and bomber jackets with remarkable restraint
Rimzim Dadu menswear price
Rimzim Dadu’s silhouettes are sharp and formal, yet express her core design idiom of “restrained maximalism”. It is “glamour with fun”, she explains. Hailing her groundbreaking fashion, stylist Rahul Vijay describes it as, “Menswear created by a distinct female gaze: One that makes the garments nonconformist, and the men, desirable.” It is menswear a woman would want her man in, like this asymmetric metal bandhgala with pants, priced at Rs 1.51 lakh
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