The storytelling was on point in Abarna Kugathasan’s second show for her label Kitschy Couture. Last February, she showed off her extravagant pieces (mainly dresses at the time) in a magnificent Tamil wedding ceremony in which the bride married herself. “Now this season is a honeymoon collection—after marrying herself, the bride is going on a honeymoon getaway to this artificial paradise.
” Quite literal, the show that was imaginatively staged in Stadtbad Neukölln, a public pool, started with a scantily clad “bride” being sent on a journey by two male models, meaning she floated around on a giant inflatable swan. Artificial Paradise was an apt name for the collection, via which the designer once again addressed her family background and the fusion of two very different cultures. Kugathasan is the daughter of Tamil immigrants who moved to Germany from Sri Lanka in the mid-1990s.
She grew up in a “very conservative Tamil household, but with a very western and very German surrounding,” as she says. When she started her label, she went back to her parents’ home to do some picture research. “When you look at pictures of how they lived in the ’90s, you would see a really typical German living room, but the next second, you would notice things like plastic lotus flowers in the cabinets and plastic banana trees everywhere.
It’s almost like you are curing your homesickness by artificially recreating your former home. I was born into this in between world and t.
