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'AI is a bouncing board': Meet Indian royal bringing 'bandhgala' back, designing with tech

Do AI and design go hand in hand? Yes, says the designer to the stars

It’s the gent’s imposing stature that is most striking when he walks into the Dubai Mall’s Blue Box Café by Tiffany, his black outfit a contrast to the turquoise splashes around the place. Raghavendra Rathore is in a black bandhgala — a collared jacket that his eponymous menswear brand is most famous for.

As we order coffee on an early Sunday morning, the designer to the stars begins to explain his trip to the UAE this time around is to generate interest, conversations (and possibly partnerships) around tech in the design space. His clientele include Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey and Bollywood stars Shah Rukh Khan, Diljit Dosanjh, and Saif Ali Khan.

But his interest in innovation and design goes back decades, to his roots in the stately city of Jodhpur in Rajasthan. He is a member of the Jodhpur royal family, and his lineage can be traced back over 800 years. His family were natural trendsetters — his great-grandfather Sri Sardar Singh reportedly made the Jodhpur safa (headgear) and achkan (jacket) popular while his grand-aunt, Maharani Gayatri Devi was known for her gravitas and elegant style.

But it was more than the people who influenced Rathore. “I always feel that coming from a desert, you really invest in the future. You really don't go and start putting whatever resource you have [into] today, not knowing whether it’s going to rain and whether the crops are going to be okay; you invest in ideas that are going to fruitfully line up in the next five-six years,” he explains.

Temperature controlled

Which is why the tech that’s been called the most disruptive of our generation, artificial intelligence (AI), intrigues him so. He mulls over a bottle of perfume that could keep a fragrance at its optimal temperature. “[Thinking like this] is possible because I studied electronics and robotics very early in my life, and I really think AI is the best investment we [as the brand] have done. And we did it when the Google Glass had come out.”

This tech-driven thought process also led him to ask the question: How does one employ AI in a design house? “Imagine how it would be if Blade Runner was shot in 1920s in Jodhpur. The products will have to have aesthetics that are local,” he explains. But the tech will be world class.

“I always think that a cushion or a chair must remind you that you’ve been sitting for more than a minute and a half and that it’s time to get up and walk. I mean if a watch can do it, why can’t the furniture? Incorporating things which have a high health quotient and a high intelligence is very important [in lifestyle products],” he adds.

But he crinkles his nose as he considers adding these tech gizmos to clothes. “You can’t put intelligence on clothing. Of course, you can do some silly thing that will do this or that,” he says, “But lifestyle is an endless sea of possibilities.”

As Rathore contemplates the shape the sector will take, he explains that currently the brand is reinventing itself to position itself in lifestyle. “It’s moving away from clothing and classic bandhgalas...

“And as a techie, to be in this paradigm of AI is just a phenomenal advantage. And my teams are now looking up to me again like they used to earlier for this next phase of brand development. During the corporatisation phase, I gave them independence, but now they need somebody who can visualise something that’s not there.”

And while the Jetsons- or Back to the Future II-like responsive gadgets might be a while in the making, the forward-thinking designer has already honed in on some uses for the AI that are available today. “AI is a bouncing board,” he explains, adding that for design, his firm uses software like Flux AI. “When you give a command to create something, first, the AI needs to know who you are and understand the guardrails of the brand aesthetics. You need coders to build that profile for you. Every time you're designing a new look like we are for a cricket team right now, it will give you hundreds of options in a couple of seconds, but eventually the designer has to pick up and create the look,” he says.

“But what research you would do in three days, it’s being done in a fraction of the time. We use AI at a very early stage, which is [while looking at] aesthetics and design. “For example, when we do interior work for hotels. When we are designing floor plan, the exact size and the cutting of the baton or whatever it is, is done in 30 seconds, and it’s the perfect size. You don't need the person to go to the physical location and measure any more.”

“I think everybody will be doing this in the year or so,” he adds.

India is not a nation of snake charmers or Bollywood, says Rathore, adding that it has so much more going for it; things that people should capitalise on and represent properly on the global stage.

And Indian fashion has changed over the years. “The first thing I see is that there’s been from zero to 100 per cent capitalisation in a matter of two decades.” And yet, he insists, the country isn’t sure about what Indian design is. “My whole shout out to design community students who are about to graduate is that start defining what is Indian design. Right now, nobody knows. When you have to express it in physical form, what is Indian design? Once you can answer that question, I think you will start seeing a revolution in terms of people emulating that style, but it takes one person to get the ball rolling.”

He also talks about his clients; the elite who have yachts and planes and lifestyle products. “The idea would be to do one project which invites all these things, which is the real estate, because once you have an apartment which is at decent price, everything there needs to be redesigned. And the world is moving to a bespoke space. Everything is customised, which is falling into our direction of growth very beautifully.”

That said, there’s a reason his brand, Raghavendra Rathore, will always specialise in the bandhgala. “The Indian bandhgala is to make you sit erect and give you a very upright posture, a regal look. I think we found that long ago and said, ‘Let's just reinvent the fit to bring a little comfort’. It is always going to be the bedrock of the brand. And these things last a lifetime. You can have them in different colours, different embroidery, different things, but the structure is going to be very similar. You change the structure very rarely,” he explains.

That said, he likes crafting ensembles for people in the UAE. “Dubai is so blessed to have such diversity, because the Russian physique is different. The native is very different. You can’t get that in India. The kind of clients that we do when we look at body types, the bandwidth of what services are required for this region is much more because the aesthetics and the body type is very different. And I'm sure every other brand is equally going through the same maze of, how do you make sure that your services are on point.”

Coffee’s done, we shake hands and walk away, wondering what AI will have in store for us next.

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