‘It’s like our very own Tarun Tahiliani Wikipedia’

Twenty-two glass-fronted cupboards take up about 900 sq ft of Tarun Tahiliani’s (TT) four-storey atelier in Gurugram.

They stand in a fire-proof, temperature- and humidity-controlled room that is carefully lit with artificial light only, to protect the 7,000 pieces that these cupboards hold.

Some of the pieces date to 1995, the year of the label’s launch. There are swatches and panels here, sample and prototype outfits.

Across the rest of the archive are photographs, sketches and tech-packs containing details such as measurements, construction details and production methods.
“The blueprint of Tarun’s career, minus a few items truly lost to time, is contained in this room, to be retrieved at any moment, should the need arise. And the need arises quite often. It is part of daily design process at TT,” says Gurvinder Kaur Gundev, who heads the archive.
Since being formally organised in 2020-21, the archive has helped Tahiliani’s team recreate lost garments, down to the last detail. It served as a resource for the 62-year-old couturier’s memoir, Tarun Tahiliani: Journey to India Modern (2023; co-authored with Alia Allana).
Next year, Tahiliani will tap into the archive for his show at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, where he will juxtapose archival pieces with museum displays.
The archive will soon move to a space twice this size, says Gundev. “The aim is to eventually have every piece made by the label accessible here in either physical or digital form.” Excerpts from an interview.
* What was it like to pull it all together?
Putting the archive together was like a treasure hunt. We knew what there was, but it was a scattered collection. We had to find an effective way to sort and organise it. (It is now indexed like a library.)
Eka Archiving (a Delhi-based archiving service) helped us set up the process of how to document swatches and panels, and helped us figure out what required immediate attention, such as the kind of language to use for indexation.
We meticulously documented elements such as base fabrics, techniques used for surface ornamentation, colours, materials, time taken to create each piece, and the specific designers and karigars involved.
* You mentioned lost pieces…
Before the archive was formally set up, Tarun estimates that at least 400 to 500 master swatches were lost. Swatches like those are not always replicable, especially since there wasn’t as much digitisation and documentation in the early years.
So we had to come to terms with those being lost to time.
Some iconic pieces had luckily been worn by celebrities and had therefore received media coverage or been part of photoshoots, and were thus inadvertently documented. This helped.
We have also always had a way of photographing collection and custom couture pieces on mannequins, for clients before delivery, which served as documentation as well.
* How does the archive help recreate iconic outfits?
That’s the fun part of archives. It can be like a clue hunt that helps you solve a puzzle to reach a goal.
Recently, for the launch of Tarun’s book in November, we wanted to showcase one of his most iconic dresses, which supermodel Karlie Kloss wore at the amfAR Foundation for Aids Research gala in Cannes in 2013. To our disappointment, we couldn’t track down the garment. But in our neatly arranged archive, we found the original sketches and notes made by Tarun. We also had images, which contained close-ups of surface ornamentation and drape details. As a result, the piece could be re-created with the same specifications. It was like the dress re-incarnated.
* Tell us about the cupboards…
The glass fronts help us see the swatches and panels without having to handle them. There are cords attached that let us flip through them, even once the cupboard is open, without touching the material. Temperature and humidity are controlled, to keep mould and moths away. The space is also fire-proof, with a fire-retardant exposed-brick structure. And it is windowless, to keep outside light from entering.
* How does the indexing work?
Our specialised software helps us navigate the collection more easily.
The more information one can capture about the item, the richer the resource gets. So it is now part of our design process to make note of every process that a swatch undergoes. All this is entered into the system — which is now like our very own TT-Wikipedia.