Some rebellions start with a sword. Anjelika Krishna’s started with a sewing machine.
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In the fall of 2000, after six months of helping create designs for major stores in Bombay and New Delhi, she rebelled again by coming to Chicago. “The fashion I had been doing before coming here was very practical. Because the Indian market catered to practicality, if you went a little over the marketing point, it won’t sell. I found it very confining.”
She began moving away from the embroidery-based styles she had been accustomed to and started getting more and more interested in architecture. “I’ll look at a Frank Gehry form; I’ll draw an outline of the whole building. I try to see what kind of curves that he’s mostly taken into consideration–maybe it’s like a circle and he’s really multiplied it, or it’s a triangle–and I incorporate that in the silhouette of the garment.” Her interest in merging architecture and fashion was in full swing when she met Mahendra Sambandan, 24, a fellow Indian native who’d arrived at the Art Institute last fall to pursue an MFA in interior architecture.
Krishna, who will be interning this summer in New York, is still up in the air about returning home after her studies. But if she does, she says she’d like to push the boundaries a bit.
