TVR is barely a year old. So far, it has refrained from commercial advertising. Vipul feels the company is too young, too small for an ad budget.
By Preeti Verma Lal
Tango Red. Yes, that’s my name. My number is 08. Little lah-di-dah, did you say? Look at me, first. My inners are pure silk with fluttering butterflies; my buttons shimmer with a hint of gold, the seams on my curves are sedulously sewn, and the YKK zippers with metal teeth are mill dyed to prevent colour spill. I am hand-chiselled. Don’t pucker your nose. I am not off-the-shelf types. I am special. Extraordinary. There’s no one quite like me. There’s something about me. Everything’s exclusive. You see that brass monogram in Baroque font. That high collar. The two-way zipper closure. That unusual ruby red of my Italian skin. Those diamonds quilted on my elbow. Six men hunched over me for five days. To create me. Took them 60 hours. I am bespoke. I am Tango Red. A bespoke short jacket from The V Renaissance (TVR), a New Delhibased bespoke luxury maker. Yeah, obviously, I am pricey. My tag: Rs 1,15,300. Add the taxes, please.
In the deafening peak-hour clamour, I was driving to the TVR atelier in Vasant Kunj to see Tango Red, an Illusionist, weekender travel bag. Harvard Tales, a duffel with trolley. And Ms V Ebony, a handbag for women. All bespoke luxury. I walk in into a whiff of leather and a warm hello from a bearded, pony-tailed Vipul Amar,the founder and managing director of TVR. From a steel shelf, leather rolls peep — burgundy red with a glaze, brown with alligator grain, charcoal black in snakeskin, whisper white, an unusual teal… Mostly cow leather sourced from the best tanneries across the world. Bison leather from Arizona and Texas in the US, Tango Red from Italy, English Bridle from the UK. On a table are candy jars stacked with brass tacks, pins, charms and rivets. Custom-made to perfection. A beefy blue box has tools. In a stout round jar is expensive animal fat. To moisturize the leather. All for a bespoke product.
Leather Tales
Vipul sits on the floor. Sheets of leather lie by his toe. He pulls, twists, scratches, pounds on leather pieces to elaborate on grains and finish. A connoisseur goes beyond that gleam on the hide. That could be baloney. He shows me tick scars on a cow hide. He knows leather. He is fussy about quality. He once tied a swatch of leather on his shoes and waded through slush and mud to test its durability. When in doubt, he washes a tiny piece with lime, salt and detergent to separate the good from the ugly.
I sit cross-legged on the floor running my hand over leather swatches in the beautiful black box. Leather begins to slip under my skin — I, a leather ignoramus, pick up a few lessons.
A luxury bespoke buyer can pick his leather. He can have his fave photograph as a lining print. He can choose the weight of the button — 17-35 gms. The rivets on the sleeves can have gold, antique brass, gold or chrome finish. If he prefers light-weight jackets, the leather is diligently skived to weigh less. Purists swear by experience of being fitted — the process of being measured, choosing the details such as the right shoulder line, the lapel, the silhouette, going for fittings, the impeccable finishing. For a jacket, the dummy is first created in rexine. Every crease, every seam, every fold is checked on the dummy before creating the final jacket. Quite like a jacket, every tiny detail of a bag can be customized.
Vipul has no formal training in design. His lineage is forest/agro trade, but his DNA seemingly has an art helix. He scribbles and lo! a design is sketched. His mind is wired into aesthetics. When a bespoke buyer wants initials on the jacket, he refrains from hammering it on the clichéd heart. The height, the complexion, the mien of the customer together decides the initials’ position. Once a slightly hunched customer wanted initials by the pockets. Vipul stuck them on the nape — it took the onlooker’s gaze off the man’s hunch! He knows no pentameters, but he spews poetry. Vipul never trained as a photographer but runs the Vipul Amar School of Photography (he shot all photographs for this feature). He paints everything in his mind. That is how he designs all TVR products.
It helps to have a trained psychologist as director (strategy and operations). Harsheen K Arora often steps in when, say, a glam high-flyer is doddering between a red and a teal bag. A computer science graduate as associate director (productions) comes in handy. Prayas Chutani puts everything in place — as if even bespoke can be structured into binary basics. I am caught in leather-talk. Suddenly, the whirr of a sewing machine distracts me. Rakesh Sharma, the mastercraftsman is assiduously sewing a dark brown laptop bag with light brown piping. Gireesh S Nair, vice-president, is poring over an Excel sheet — he crunches numbers. Harsheen is tossing between gold and brown finish for the bag’s buckle while Prayas is running a machine to get the perfect gold emboss on dark leather. He tenderly unfolds a paper packet, as if it held a diamond solitaire. It’s just a brass charm for the bag – Prayas abhors blemishes on brass. TVR has 11 employees but Prayas hammers the rivets himself. He is that fastidious.
TVR, however, exists beyond leather bags and jackets. There’s bespoke photographic art on canvas, art on wallpaper and drapes art on silk couture, stationery, cards and books, leather desk-tools and office supplies, brass monogram buttons, charms, cuff-links and lapel pins. In their Greater Kailash I studio, a wall wears a smiling-infant wallpaper. That’s bespoke art. The silk pocket squares can be stashed in the pocket or framed as art. An elegantly large Winchester chair can be done in bison leather. In sunshine yellow with a teak carving of your choice. That’s bespoke furniture.
Art lives in the TVR studio. And new ideas keep popping as epiphany. Gireesh is thinking leather helmets. Vipul is drawing bespoke shoes in his head. Harsheen is contemplating the best use of the blue/black snake-skin print leather before cutting it into a luxury product.
TVR is barely a year old. So far, it has refrained from commercial advertising. Vipul feels the company is too young, too small for an ad budget. He prefers the old-world word-of-mouth way of advertising. Even walking-human ads work. Like, swashbuckling cricketer Shikhar Dhawan wearing a TVR jacket to an award ceremony. And Saahil Prem, star of Mad About Dance, doing film promos wrapped in TVR luxury jacket. New Delhi’s The Imperial Hotel got branding done on brass and leather. Bespoke is gradually eating into the Indian luxury pie, cornering 15% of the Rs 1,300 crore luxury apparel and accessories market. Vipul is in no hurry, though. He is biding his time. The TVR empire will get built, he says. For now, he is content laying one bespoke brick at a time.
The V in TVR borrows Vipul’s first name. Arguably so. Behind every product is a story. His story. A story that began on a whim. On a plantation trip when Vipul wanted a new bag. Call it absent-minded coincidence. Or a sheer stubborn bout. He wanted a new bag. A pair of scissors in hand he cut a leather sheet into a bag. Hammered pieces with brass tacks. Uneven. Jagged. Asymmetrical. Careless. Yet a pretty and durable bag. In that slipshod hammering was luxury anointed. In the folly of that stubbornness was bespoke born. In that reckless whim Vipul Amar found his calling. He christened it The V Renaissance.
