Through more than fifty couture looks, ROSEROOM presented a woman whose softness has always been her greatest strength.
Lace is where ROSEROOM began, and on Sunday evening at The Pavilion, Taj Palace, New Delhi, Isha Jajodia showed what years of working with it have taught her. Softly, Strong is the House’s fourth consecutive collection for Hyundai India Couture Week, in association with Nexxus New York, and the first in which every technique the atelier has learned appears in a single room.
Chantilly, corded and guipure laces were layered against one another and then worked further by hand: appliqué set into the ground, florals built in three dimensions, transparencies anchored with pearls and Swarovski crystals. The season introduces clay to the House vocabulary, moulded by hand into floral motifs and sculptural detail and set into lace so that the two read as one material. The references are European romanticism, French architecture and vintage femininity, held to Indian craftsmanship, which remains the only tradition capable of executing them at this level.
Corsetry holds the collection together. It runs through more than fifty looks: corseted gowns,skirts, sarees, tailored jackets, tuxedos and tulle skirts. The palette opens in ivory and blush and deepens through emerald, teal, ruby, ROSEROOM’s signature scarlet and gold, so that the collection arrives where its title does, at certainty.
A couture house is a workforce before it is anything else. Softly, Strong represents many thousands of hours of handwork carried out across ROSEROOM’s ateliers over many months. The greater part of that work was done by women. A number of them work from home, in towns and villages they had once expected to leave for the cities, using skills their mothers held, for wages that arrive in their own names.
The House extended this through Spread the Smile, an organisation that supports women in rural communities through home-based craftsmanship. Its artisans handcrafted a substantial proportion of the three-dimensional floral motifs in the collection, and their work carries beyond the runway into the show invitations and the gifting.
Isha Jajodia, Founder and Creative Director, ROSEROOM: “This collection is about the woman who wears it. She has lived enough to know that softness is never weakness, that grace can be powerful, and that vulnerability and resilience can exist in the same breath. She no longer needs to choose between strength and femininity, because she has always carried both.”
Isha Jajodia has now shown at Hyundai India Couture Week for four consecutive years. The body of work is consistent: lace treated as a structural material rather than a decorative one, femininity treated as a form of strength, and a house built on the hands that make it.
