Earlier this year, Supriya Lele and her business partner Donald Ryan opened an art gallery in the most unlikely of places: a disused pharmacy in Southwark. With its bright green shopfront left untouched – still bearing an NHS logo and promising ‘prescriptions’ and ‘advice’ – it launched in May this year with a spotlight on the hazy expressionist scenes of British-Indian painter Jai Chuhan. “There’s nothing people find more confusing than a pharmacy window with no pharmacy in it,” Lele says over a video call from the space on the bustling Newington Causeway, through the duration of which sirens scream past and passersby stop to peer in more than once. “Even with an empty space and paintings on the wall, they come in all the time asking for things. People cannot wrap their heads around it.”
Offering a relief from the austere private galleries of central London, the unusual space, like everything that emerges from Lele’s world, came about organically. She wanted to do something with Chuhan’s dreamlike paintings and, serendipitously, the landlord of her studio offered her the pharmacy which sits below it. This open attitude has seen 2023 be a year of exciting firsts for the designer. Alongside opening the gallery with Ryan, Lele spent months crafting a collection for Victoria’s Secret’s big bid at a feminist rebrand – debuted at the start of September – all the while gearing up to stage her first show outside of the NEWGEN incubator, which took place yesterday in the shadowy brutalist car park of the Barbican.
Unveiled to an entrancing industrial soundtrack by NTS mainstay Samuel Strang, the collection presented a celebration of the design language Lele has been building since her start in 2016. Twisting drapery riffed on the saris of her Indian heritage; sexy cuts of a 1990s bent followed the minimalist codes of her hero Helmut Lang; and sensual textures of stretch georgette, raw silk and soft jersey were paired with more unusual materials, like car seat leather used in Bentleys, to create pieces meant for her women to feel amazing in. “I guess really this collection is a consolidation of my identity,” she says. “But it also feels quite grown up – a bit like moving forward.”
Whether drawing upon her youth as a teenage metalhead or observing what her all-female studio team are wearing, each season Lele’s inspirations are personal. This time, the designer was looking at everything from classical Indian sculpture and goddess motifs, to Bruce Weber photography and her own back catalogue of designs. “I was also inspired by looking at some of the colours within Jai’s paintings, as she uses amazing tones,” she says of the collection’s palette, which mixed neutral shades with earthy browns, soft sky blues, iridescent greens and powder purples – a tribute to the frosted lilac lipstick Chuhan wore to her exhibition opening, which Lele wanted to “recreate the feeling of” in a fabric. The resulting collection, she says, is “very much about my existing world, and pulling into it further.”
At the centre of this world, and all of Lele’s designs, is a devoted attention to the female body – how fabrics fall and move on it and, above all, how it feels to wear her clothes. “I don’t ever design flat, it’s all done by hand directly on the body,” she says of her design process. “We do fittings pretty much every week in the studio. It’s a luxurious way of working, I have to be honest, but I think that’s why there’s a specific kind of energy [to the work]. This season we worked on lots of low-slung feeling, louche, sexy moments, and tank tops that are twisted up. I like it to feel like someone’s touched it, like someone’s pulled it or twisted it. I think those gestures make the pieces attractive.”
The product of these tireless hours of work on the body, honing her skin-baring shapes, was felt in the Barbican car park yesterday, where Lele’s women appeared in total command of their sensual energy. “The idea of sexiness I find quite a Western way of looking at things,” Lele says. “I look at my heritage to define what I think is sensual or sensitive. It’s subtle, it’s gestural, and I think that’s what I’ve tried to maintain in my work. I think this collection is a really confident vision – that’s all we want to feel, right? You want to feel confident and great.”