If there is one institute in a quiet but resolute dialogue with the idea of India, it is the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad. It was founded as a post-Independence modernist institution in 1961, with a Nehruvian vision to respond with responsible design strategies to social, economic and cultural changes all around. Today, both its vim and vulnerability lie in its stoic fixation with the old socialist model. Apparel and textile design may be NID’s only definitive extensions to fashion education, yet an NID product can never be ‘just a fashion designer’.
If a NIFT graduate is made from flashy lycra, an NID graduate is moulded from baked Indian mud. “It’s about a holistic understanding with an inside-out approach,” says David Abraham, of the label Abraham & Thakore, an NID alumnus. Fashion, believes Abraham, can only be created and lived through an interaction with music, cinema, social realities and cultural diffusion.
NID graduates who have joined the fashion industry have undoubtedly brought sustainability and ethical responsibility as distinct values. They are ideologically sound but their understanding of fashion as business is limited. The institute offers remarkable leadership to the design industry through research and education. But barring a few, most designers minted at NID have yet to master the art of marrying function with form and turn it into a commercially viable enterprise. “Ours is a value-centric design institute based on social connectivity in alignment with Indian crafts and focus on sustainability,” says Prof Pradyumna Vyas, director, NID. He agrees that the former generation of NID designers did not have media savvy and commercial aggression, but says the new crop is taking this aspect seriously.
However, Prof M.P. Ranjan, a lauded design thinker from the faculty of design, feels it is in the context of work ethic and creative exploration that NID education must be evaluated. “Individual contributions by a number of our alumni stand out as path-breaking, straddling many fields,” he says. “They are undocumented and, therefore, inconspicuous. Indian media too seems to be ignoring these contributions,” he adds. NID may need to refashion its own approach. By design.
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