On July 10, Kallol Datta returns to Mumbai with his first solo art show in the city that first made him famous. But please don’t call this a comeback. Datta doesn’t do fashion anymore.
Since he moved away from mainstream fashion, he has built a serious textile art practice, served as a curator to the inaugural Kolkata Queer Arts Month in ’23, and is a member of the creative advisory council for the State of Fashion Biennale ’26—apart from showcasing at a dozen international art galleries and biennales. He’s not interested in coming back to fashion, or doing a special show, and he certainly won’t use his scissors to pattern up a new piece at the behest of a celebrity stylist as an art project for an actor.
“I wish I had given fewer interviews then,” Datta ribs, and then adds, “I haven’t engaged with the Indian fashion industry for the past seven or eight years. But across all creative professions, we do need makers, craftspersons, artists and designers who are brave. To acknowledge the hypernationalism that has crept into Indian design, and to address that in a focused, articulate manner.”
One thing has not changed, he is still very, very mad – as a hatter or raving, depends on how deeply you understand his work. Most creatives will testify that once you are declared an outlier, you can continue to do as you please without worries of societal expectations. “Why do you think art saves so many of us?” I ask him. Datta replies, “Right now, the way the world is one giant dumpster fire, people are seeking and discovering coping mechanisms in the arts, the humanities. We self-soothe with the arts.”
Once, on a call, I had to enquire about his whereabouts, due to his whispered responses. Datta was working out of Pratyay, an assisted living facility in Kolkata for recovered individuals from state-run mental health hospitals. The centre enables residents to transition from institutional care to community life; he was working with them to create works for Kolkata Queer Arts Month ’24 and for Experimenter Editions III.
In 2022, Datta chanced upon Ban Zhao, China’s first known female historian during the Han dynasty (202 BC–9 AD, 25–220 AD). An excerpt from Ban’s Lessons for Women—“Guard one’s action with a sense of shame. In movement and rest, it is always done in proper measure. This is what is meant by woman’s virtue”—triggered him to create this new show.
For Volume IV, he collaborated with Ek Tara Creates in Kolkata, which employs women from vulnerable backgrounds. “It was true knowledge sharing,” Datta says. “They taught me crochet and knitting techniques. I was able to share more about art.”
Moving away from his now signature sculptural, amoebic textile forms, Volume IV focuses on flat surfaces and Jeogori-inspired forms (the top portion of the hanbok, a traditional Korean ensemble); as is the norm for Datta, these are donated garments that have been restored and recontextualised. The exhibit unfolds through four chapters and includes Japanese kimonos, saris and fragments. Some that once belonged to his grandmother—her passing earlier this year made this process a really personal labour of blood, sweat and tears—and certain others from the archive of Belgian designer Dries Van Noten, acquired through an anonymous donor.
“Each donated item is a marker—of memory, an episodic event, a lived experience.” A few shirts and blouses from Van Noten’s 2000 collections, were reworked to make three jeogoris, in the exact dimensions of historical and excavated samples from the late Joseon period from 18th and 19th centuries. While Datta claims to have been only superficially aware of Van Noten’s work before the donation, I point out their similarity. Van Noten also left fashion at the height of his career. In a time of massive commercial gains, Van Noten’s quiet retirement felt like a final act of integrity—something Datta lives by. Take for instance his materials, “While working on the series based on late-Joseon Korea,” he notes, “I was conscious not to use any Japanese textiles because of the trauma of occupation.”
Datta’s work has always demanded you sit with discomfort, not resolve it. From his early fashion collections with radical cuts, bulbous forms, and unorthodox styling—as a challenge to the zeitgeist—to now, he has long challenged the visual codes others avoid. “Since its inception,” he states, “the act of donning cloth has been political. Dominant majorities have used clothing to intimidate, subjugate and control minorities into behaving, assimilating, falling in line.”
Datta’s garments didn’t flatter so much as they resisted; they exposed, reawakened and derided. Now, as he moves further into the realm of textile-based art, that tension remains, but it has grown quieter, deeper and even more unsettling. There’s perhaps an unconscious but nuanced commentary on constriction. Like silkworms escaping their own cocoons or clarity emerging after a cold plunge that almost arrested your heartbeat. Pressure becomes a portal in Datta’s work—not to suffering, but to clarity. The madness is not in the artist, but in the systems built around normalcy. This exhibit doesn’t escape those structures; it mirrors it.
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