The stories were good in Abarna Kugathasan’s second show for her label Kitschy Couture. Last February, she showed off her extravagant pieces (then mostly dresses) at a beautiful Tamil wedding ceremony where the bride herself got married. “Now this season is a honeymoon collection: after marrying herself, the bride goes on her honeymoon to this artificial paradise.” Quite literally, the show, which was imaginatively staged in Stadtbad Neukölln, a public swimming pool, began with a scantily clad ‘bride’ being sent on a journey by two male models, meaning she floated around on a giant inflatable swan.
Artificial Paradise was an appropriate name for the collection, with the designer revisiting her family background and the merging of two very different cultures. Kugathasan is the daughter of Tamil immigrants who moved to Germany from Sri Lanka in the mid-1990s. She grew up in a “very conservative Tamil household, but with a very Western and very German environment,” as she says. When she started her label, she went back to her parents’ house to do some photo research. “If you look at pictures of how they lived in the ’90s, you saw a very typical German living room, but the next moment you saw things like plastic lotus flowers in the cupboards and plastic banana trees everywhere. It’s almost like curing your homesickness by artificially recreating your former home. I was born in this in-between world and that is exactly what Kitschy Couture is about,” Kugathasan said after the show.
In keeping with the holiday theme, the collection consisted of swimwear in the form of adjustable tights and bikinis with large rose petals as decoration. There were also lace babydoll dresses, embroidered satin sarong pants, ruffled pajamas, a turquoise wrap skirt with train and lots of playful lingerie-style pieces. For one look, vintage bras were even reworked into an asymmetrical top with suspenders. Kugathasan generally works with deadstock fabrics and has also been supported with fabrics from British designer Simone Rocha, who is Kugathasan’s mentor through Mentoring Matters, a global mentoring program for candidates from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.
The mixed-gender models, who walked around the pool, were also adorned with body tattoos in the shapes of dolphins or roses and plastic earplugs with an ocean theme, and carried dolphin-shaped bags with airbrush prints. Is this for everyone, every day? No. But is this creative and special, a welcome maximalist change from the many dark and club-appropriate collections in Berlin, and completely coherent in itself? Of course.