Waris Ahluwalia is a very busy, multi-tasking kind of guy. Accidental jewellery designer, sometime actor and frequenter of New York's style-setting scene, he's not your average fashion player.
The beginnings of his label are an oft-repeated tale – Waris has no formal fashion training, but he had some ideas for rings that he wanted to wear and duly commissioned them to be made. And then one day he was scrolling through the rails at L.A. boutique Maxfields when the eagle eyed staff spotted his rings, fell in love with them and the rest, as they say, is history: the House of Waris was born.
‘I love history,’ says Waris. ‘My inspiration for everything I do is love and history, for everything, my life and my work. I don’t claim to understand either of those, they make no sense to me but it’s what inspires me and what keeps me coming back for more, and trying to understand them.’
But his greatest passion is for the philosophy of slow fashion and he champions the idea of being connected somehow to everything that you buy. His pieces are all hand-crafted - when he first started the label he made everything in New York but quickly moved proceedings to India because ‘…there was no process, there was no romance and without romance there’s nothing.’ Instead his offerings are now made in India and Thailand , not in big factories but by small groups of artisans that Waris has tracked down. ‘I work with craftsmen whose families have been working this way for hundreds of years,’ he says, ‘they’ve been trained since childhood, it gets passed down. I respect that process so much.’ And he’s very picky about the stores that carry his pieces, vetting everyone from the shop floor staff to the CEO’s. ‘It is a strict process,’ says Waris, ‘but you have to be awesome, that’s the criteria’. Dover Street Market is his only UK stockist.
He has his studio in the Big Apple - not to mention a tea shop underneath - and he’s a familiar face at the most fashionable of parties in the city, rubbing shoulders with everyone from Chloe Sevigny to Karen Elson . But Waris sends much of his time traveling the world, visiting friends in Rome and Paris, overseeing the craftsmen in India and sketching out his new collections on beautiful beaches. ‘I’ve never designed in New York, I can’t, he tells us. ‘It’s the energy and electricity, it’s too much. I really need to physically pause to do it. I disappear, I take a week or two weeks to draw and then that’s the collection. I just need a few days to stop the motor and usually that happens with a dip in the sea and it’s always been in the tropics.’
And of course it’s not just the House of Waris that occupies his time. He’s popped in a clutch of friend Wes Anderson’s movies (you’ll have spotted him in The Darjeeling Limited and A Life Aquatic. And, proving just how multi-talented he is, he’s learning to rap for his next role. He’s certainly not afraid of a bit of hard work. ‘We can all create a magical life for ourselves, you just have to know what you want and then go get it, that’s it, there’s no formula’, he tells us. ‘And you have to be willing to fight for it and work for it, and if you don’t get it you don’t get it but you have to take that chance. I don’t know any other way.’
The latest House of Waris collection is, of course, inspired by both love and history, and is a continuation of last season’s bird-themed offerings. These are, by anybody’s standards, serious, not to mention seriously beautiful pieces of jewellery . They’re made from gold, diamonds, sapphires and rubies - needless to say the riffs on slow fashion do not mean that Waris is championing the cheap. ‘I’m all for consumption, this isn’t like a talk about ‘spend less’, spend as much as you want but know how you’re spending it. Spend as much as you want, I don’t care particularly, I’m not going to stop you, not with my prices!’
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