Jaisalmer Darshan
The Wild, The Weird and the Instinctively Swaggy: Observations from The Golden City.
At some point brands just stopped producing printed materials. I’m not talking about a 10 year retrospective. But if all contemporary photography is geared towards an archetypal IG homogeneity then it feels like we’re losing something. I’m still collecting old Comme and Yohji lookbooks that you seemingly can only find at a Hi-Bridge or Dashwood these days. And when you find something that good it is a bit of a rush. It feels special in a way that an archive moodboard cannot capture. So we’re going big on print, in the hope that twenty years from now, one of these free zines that we give to show attendees actually feels quite special.
Last season we put out a book with photographer, Jeremy Everett and stylist Julie Ragolia. We went around different spots in Ahmedabad to put that together. Those images will be out soon. But through that experience everyone on our team realized how valuable preserving this ever evolving archive in print form can be.
For this season, we worked with Julie Ragolia and Phil Engelhardt to document our Spring Summer 26 collection in Jaisalmer. Those images won’t be out for a while. We printed a limited amount of zines for our show in Paris and people can collect those physical copies for now (I wish we could sell them but unfortunately there’s too many agents involved!). On this trip, I took my Leica and captured the weird and wonderful time capsule that is Jaisalmer.
Strange hair dye choices, chotis, fabulous printed shirts and people with a self-assuredness while dressing that is just unbelievably admirable. It’s so bad it’s maybe quite good? Or at least interesting enough to me.
The Wild, The Weird and the Instinctively Swaggy.
The heat in Jaisalmer can feel like you’re inside an air fryer. The “desert loo”, a dry heat that smacks you in the face is hard to tolerate. We had to split our shoot into two sessions to avoid the harsh sunlight in the afternoon. Our visit was also during the off season. Souvenir shops, cafes and eateries were shut for most of the day and their owners taking refuge from the sweltering heat. The children who lived in the fort were enjoying their extended weekend too as school had been closed for the day due to notice of heatwaves. The gully cricket league was in full swing.
We were there to visit the Fort, the city most prominent (and possibly only) landmark dubbed as Sonar Qila (Golden Fort) which was once a pit stop along the ancient Silk Road. Interestingly enough, unlike other forts and Heritage sites in India which have been reduced to tourist traps and backdrops for family portraits, the Jaisalmer Fort is one of the very few living forts in the world. A surprisingly large share of its original inhabitants—nearly a quarter of the old city's population—still call it home, living in havelis and houses tucked beneath honeycomb ramparts, imbuing every alleyway with a living, breathing past.
In conversation with our driver who passed some interesting trivia, we learned that Satyajit Ray filmed Sonar Kella here in 1974. The movie in itself is a travelogue in celluloid. The story follows a detective tracing a boy’s memories of a golden fortress and hidden treasure—a story as much about Jaisalmer’s atmosphere as it is about mystery and allure.
