Fashion Olympiad kicks off in Kolkata

KOLKATA: Budding Sabyasachi Mukherjees, Kallol Dattas and Anamika Khannas assembled at the three-day NIFT Fashion Olympiad on Tuesday, putting their potentials to the most rigorous tests here what was a symbiosis of all aspects of fashion designing. Christened the Nift Fashion Olympiad (NPO), with a philosophy, “Sanyogam: Eternal Connectivity of Youth”, the mega competition that kicked off in a formal function inside NIFT’s Salt Lake campus will pick the best minds for a national platform — in a finale in one of the NIFTs, and then in the international arena.
More than 500 students from leading schools, colleges and centres of excellence, including IIM-Kolkata and IIT-Kolkata, registered themselves from the morning to be a part of Kolkata’s first campus-Olympiad. The idea is to compete, exhibit, share and connect. The first competition is being held at the campus level. From painting the wall to making jingles to street-style photography to fashion quiz and fashion installation – the Olympiad has covered almost everything in the micro fashion fields. The winner among the participants, aged 15 to 24 years, will eventually go up to the international level through the “World Skill Competition”.
Some of them turned up in their uniforms to take on challenges like “Fashion’Mbition (visual merchandising), Brand-o-Mania, Fashion & Music, some raked their brains to brand-teasers in “Quick Silver” where quiz master Orrel O’brien asked on just about anything on fashion.
Manmotho Das (20) was particularly interested in “Fashion click o-Mania: Street-style” where click-happy photographers would go around the town, armed with their sharp shooter cameras to capture the latest quirky fashion trends. “This is my chance to prove to my parents what I can do with my camera,” he said.
What looked like a fashion festival, also turned out to be a brainstorming session between the guests (P Ishwar Bhatt, vice-chancellor, NUJS, Raisoir Gwenaelle , project coordinator, Alliance Francaise, Sushanta Banerjee, director, American Library, Amitava Das, education advisor, Campus France and Prof Bibekananda Banerjee, director, National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Kolkata. The director and the guests used the opportunity to probe ways for taking forward the activities of NIFT, Kolkata and using them in promoting Bengal’s handloom heritage.
“We are deeply involved in chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s project for branding Bengal’s unique art and craft, Biswa Bangla. Its’s wonderful that our panel of guests are interested in lend out their hands so that the many art forms could be rescued from oblivion,” said Banerjee.
The eminent jury (Sanjay Jhunjhunwala, Partho Kar, Abhishek Dutta and Kiran Uttam Ghosh) added colour to the Olympiad. “The winners will be celebrated and awarded on Thursday. The Olympiad is the mathematics of pattern-making, chemistry of colours, economics of branding that is being evaluated in the youngsters who believe in intellectualizing fashion,” director Banerjee said.
Despite the impromptu styling and cat-walking, choreographed as per the given themes, the next two days also promise not just to be a random fashion show but a lot of hard work and display of creativity.
“I can’t wait for the “junk juxtaposed-haute junkyard” tomorrow where we’ll create green fashion,” said Avik Ghosal, a participant. He was toying with ideas of making garments from plastic wrap or paper mache. The catch here is that the students can’t create add to the waste.