Moda Goa
Wendell Rodricks
Creating a book from a garment! Sounds rather strange, but designer Wendell Rodricks’ Moda Goa, a sartorial history of the state’s people from pre-historic times till the present did indeed grow out of a garment.
“Mario Miranda came to me asking me to write a specific chapter on a garment, for a book that Mario Cabral was doing,” Wendell says, with a quick flashback to 1999. “And I realised I knew nothing about the garment!”
Wanting to fill that void in his history, he set off on what he describes as a journey, which he enjoyed so much that it absorbed him for nine years. “People said I should apply for a PhD,” he says, “but there was a lot of red tape to that.”
So he took a scholarship and an internship and sat at two impressive museums, the national Museum at Libson and the Museum in Goa and completed an internship at the FIT in New York. All of which, “opened a new world and taught me so much.” A fashion designer creates clothes, and Wendell did that of course, and had shoots, and shows for his collections, but almost every day of the nine years he set aside two to three hours for work on research.
He travelled through Goa, visiting homes, and was amazed at how they threw open their cupboards and showed him clothes and jewellery... heirlooms that are now part of the book, and in some cases, part of a collection that he hopes to house in a museum.
He visited temples and studied the clothes the idols were dressed in, sometimes in cloth, other times chiseled on to stone or into metal. Everything was manna helping quench his thirst for knowing Then at the textile festival, Mantles of Myth in Jaipur he presented a powerpoint story of his findings. Siyahi head Mita Kapur jumped in and asked him to make it into a book, and Harper Collins India loved the concept. The garment had reached its destination...
The book with an amazing array of photographs is perhaps the most comprehensive chronicle of Goa’s changing history as seen through its clothes. Meticulously written and beautifully produced, the hardbound book could be a trailblazer for books on the theme from other states of our textile rich country.
Little wonder, at the first of four launches for Moda Goa at the Jaipur Literature festival, on the lawns of Taj Jai Mahal, Rajiv Sethi soon after he had unwrapped the guava fibre covering from over the volume, announced that he was ready to bequeath his collection of defunct Khumbi saris to Wendell’s museum.
Wondering what Khumbi saris are... they are beautifully woven... but, just read the book!
