Anika Gupta has always had her eye on fashion. The Mumbai, India native is now putting her interest into her fashion studies. “Since I was really young, I’ve always been interested in children’s wear and the idea of Fashion Journalism and my sister got into Fashion Design as well and I was further introduced into that field.
I found a lot of the areas really interesting especially the scope and the fields it can represent.
So I decided to come to New York in the United States of America because I wanted to pursue a degree in Fashion Design and the Parsons New School of Design allowed me to do that.”
Anika has just completed her first year and is looking forward to her sophomore year in September. Along with designing children's wear, she also wants to spend time exploring fashion journalism. “I definitely want to do children’s wear and Parsons offers me a path in my third year to do that and I am really interested in Fashion Journalism as of late and I think Fashion Journalism is basically writing about Fashion and studying the methods that go into design a collection and writing about it,” she says.
“I think that is very upcoming, but if I don’t plan on staying in the states after my education I think I can do that from India as well so I think it is like a portable job I guess,” she says. “So I am probably going to speak to my advisors and see what I can do about that while studying children’s wear.
Going to college is something everyone should get an opportunity to do says Anika, but for her she says attending Parsons School of Design is like no other institution. “Well, New York City is one of the fashion capital of the world and being in an environment like this it really prepares me for the future I think and it gives you an insight into the different designs activities you can do within fashion itself like inter-creating product design and digital design and fashion design maybe and being in New York City I think really gives it a boost, a plus point,” she says.
“Also, because of the strict curriculum they have here is really good as compared to other colleges I think because they really focus on the future and the present and they don’t look at the past. A major plus point in influencing my decision to come here was the fact that the alumni is so good and the jobs you can get by going to this college I think are really good.”
So how is fashion viewed in India? Anika says... “Countries in Asia are constantly looking towards the West for influence. Since it is more open, there’s more freedom and you take more inspiration from different sources and basically what designers in India are doing right now they are looking to the West for inspiration through designers and artists that come from here and have made an impression, an international impression I guess and that is what I want to do…bring a sense of internationalism to the stuff I do.”
Back home, textiles and colors represent who you are. Anika explains. “In New York if you design something and you projected well enough I think that you can sell it and back in India because of the textiles, the colors and the rich history I guess different colors and the clothes people wear they definitely represent which community you come from. Mostly like in the metropolitan cities like Bombay and Delhi you don’t see much of that happening, but once you go into the rural areas and you see what people are wearing, you see their patterns and the textiles… I can give you an example mire work is usually North India and more with the leaves and back to nature is more of the South,” she says.
“If you move to the East it is more of the woolen and the extra materials and cloths and blacks and whites coming in with the reds and the greens and textiles definitely do represent who you are back in India. That was a plus point there and here the plus point is that you can do your own thing and you can stand out. I think if I bring both together I can do great things.”