Actor-designer Masaba Gupta recalled the inventive use that her mother, veteran actor Neena Gupta, put her failed collection to. She said that she had stocks of unsold clothing items in her warehouse, and Neena decided to repurpose the material into household items like curtains and bedsheets. In an interview, Masaba also opened up about how dangerous things became for her business during the pandemic, when she had just Rs 2 lakh in her bank account and was told that the business would have to shut down in days.
In an interview with Faye D’Souza on her YouTube channel, Masaba recalled, “In 2018, we slumped so badly, we knew we needed to do something with the print situation. I remember we did a ‘mirchi print’. It was the biggest disaster, and I had loved that print so much. It was the biggest disaster in the history of House of Masaba. Not one person bought that print, and we had thans and thans of it. I was devastated, and there was no money, but we had to keep things rolling.”
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Asked how she got out of the ‘mirchi print’ situation, Masaba said, “I don’t think I ever got out of it. I moped for a long time, because I liked everything about that collection, be it the fabric or the colourways, or the cuts and silhouettes. But not everybody liked it. That’s when I decided that it can’t be Masaba’s choice; if I have a team, it’s got to be teamwork… That’s when I realised that the bridge between commerce and art is so important, because I’m not an artist. I’m not making clothes to put on the wall… That’s when I dropped a lot of my creative ego.”
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Asked if there is a warehouse somewhere with boxes of unused ‘mirchi print’ fabric, Masaba said, “My mother made bedsheets out of it. And then she went on to make curtains out of it. One day, I walked into her house for dinner, and her house help was wearing a nice kurta-salwar out of it. So, I said, ‘Chalo, kisi ke kaam toh aa raha hai’.”
In the same interview, Masaba also spoke about nearly having to shut her business down during the pandemic. She said, “In 2020, when COVID hit, it was the worst time of my life. I don’t think I had even Rs 12,000 to pay to my cook. It was that bad. In March, 2020, the lockdown happened and we thought it was mostly for a day or two, and it was extended to 14 days. In those 14 days, my life completely turned around.”
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