Sabyasachi Mukherjee on being a do-it-yourself designer and the movie he is now raring to make

Sabyasachi Mukherjee is a man of numbers. Hours before he threw the doors open to his most ambitious retail project yet–a 25,862 square-foot store, spread across four storeys, housed in a neo-classical heritage structure just off Mumbai’s fabled Horniman Circle–journalists received press releases in their inboxes, detailing the dazzling accoutrements that made up the magical space.

“Over 100 chandeliers, 275 carpets, 3,000 books and 150 works of art created by the Sabyasachi Foundation, layered between age-old Tanjore paintings, Pichhwais in the Deccan, Nathdwara and Kota style, vintage photography, Mughal miniatures, 19th-century Company paintings and rare lithographs and bronzes,” it said. Not to mention, Tang dynasty pottery, rare Canton vases, French Art Nouveau cabinets, Lladro figurines and other antiquities. If that wasn’t enough to shock and awe, Mukherjee tells us he spent approximately 18 hours daily, for 45 days, putting his museum of antiquities together. His company might have reported ₹ 274 crore of revenue for the fiscal year 2020, but Mukherjee is not averse to getting his hands, clothes, even fingernails, dirty while bringing his brand behemoth to life. 

Even as I mention that it was this hands-on approach that makes up my earliest memory of him, politely introducing himself to senior designers and asking them to attend his first-ever Lakme India Fashion Week show in 2002, he regales me with an anecdote he read somewhere. When filmmaker Shyam Benegal took his film Nishant to Cannes in 1976 but had no budget to promote it, he asked actors Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil, who starred in the film, to wear their best saris and parade up and down the promenade. As the sari-clad beauties caught the attention of the people, they told them about their film, exhorted them to come and watch and managed to open to a full house. “It was the sari that led to them opening house-full. It is all about do-it-yourself (DIY). If there is no DIY, it’s not fun anymore… And I would never have it any other way. I would hate my stores to be done by an interior designer, who would never understand my brief. It is so much fun talking to a carpenter and getting everything done yourself,” says Mukherjee.

So, whether it’s the parakeet-shaped faucets in the powder room on the ground floor that he sourced from New York architectural hardware store P. E. Guerin, the 18th-century Venetian handcrafted chairs that dot the space, the antique urns and cloches laden with fruits and accessories, right down to the mellifluous playlist that alternates between Edith Piaf, Leonard Cohen, Hemant Kumar, Salma Agha and Aarti Mukherjee–the attention to detail is personal and on point. His ‘Bengali babu moshai with magpie tendencies meets Parsi purveyor of good taste’ aesthetic is still alive, albeit in a more refined and polished version. “I was 24 when I started the aesthetic, now I’m 49,” he smiles. For Mukherjee, the retail experience is about more than just selling clothes and luxury handbags.

Experience is king

“In many ways, fashion is a dying industry. We’ve made a lot of money by feeding on people’s insecurities. But customers today are not as insecure. They have moved away from commodities and luxury goods into experiences. Fashion needs to speak of authenticity, craftsmanship and community development and it needs to give one an unforgettable experience. A lot of people think that these are indulgences, but this is the way retail should be,” he says, citing the example of the new Hermès store on Madison Avenue in New York City. “Does Hermès need to open a 20,250-square-foot store, which is not going to sit very well on their balance sheets? They’re doing it for survival, to make sure that they create a better experience for the consumer, who’s already dropping out. They are future-proofing their business,” he explains.

And even as Mukherjee future-proofs his own business with the stellar new experiential emporium in Mumbai, it’s really been a case of everything everywhere all at once for the Kolkata boy lately. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns proved to be all but a pause in his stratospheric plans. Since then, a sold-out H&M collaboration, a successful jewellery collection drop with Bergdorf Goodman, a spanking new store in the West Village in New York City, a jewellery store in Hyderabad–not to mention Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited acquiring a 51 per cent stake in the business–have kept him consistently in the news. While it may be exhausting for others, for Mukherjee, these are mere stepping stones to eventual global domination. But he does admit that the lockdown gave him much-needed time to reset and reassess.          

Pause and ponder

When the pandemic first hit in March 2020, Mukherjee’s immediate concern was taking care of a team he has spent 20 years building and training.  “The worst thing that you can do is to not look after people who have made you who you are”. He remembers calling his chief financial officer (CFO) with a strange request. “I asked the CFO that if I was to utilise every single bit of my bank balance and savings to pay people, without them being able to come to work, how long could we run? He said four-and-a-half years. So, the day we shut the business, I had no panic. Money comes, money goes. But skills, if they leave, it will take an entire generation to bring them back. So, I’d be a pauper at the end of the pandemic, but I’d start again. Once I made peace with myself about that, I gardened, I slept, I walked, I lost weight, I learned how to cook, I painted, I wrote short stories,” recalls Mukherjee. A lot of these short stories are now on brass plaques pinned across the store, offering tiny vignettes of the otherwise reclusive designer’s creative mind, the line between fact and fiction blurring in places, much like the stories of his life that rarely filter through the heavy cordon of personal privacy.

Social network

But Mukherjee insists the intention was never to be reclusive or enigmatic. “I’m just socially awkward. When I have to give an interview, it’s easy. But I find it difficult to sit and make small talk with somebody. You will be surprised how many successful people are socially awkward. Like Sridevi, who used to be quiet and timid, till she was in front of the camera,” he says. He quotes Madonna: ‘Inside I was a child, that could not mend a broken wing. Outside I looked for a way to teach my heart to sing.

“I’ve become much better with time. As you get older, there’s much less baggage to carry and you start being kinder about your failings. But it's not by design. I don't think I have that DNA to be able to put up a façade for so long. My anger, my resentment, my love, everything starts showing on my face very quickly,” he says.

And maturity has brought other realisations too, like wishing he would’ve spent more time with his family and friends over the last two decades. “They have been kind to me, I’ve not been kind to them. Because I was relentless in creating. And somewhere down the line when the bug of purpose gets into your head, the things that become casualties are your friends and family,” shares Mukherjee.  

Food for thought

Even as the pandemic afforded him the luxury to build a “purposeful relationship” with himself, Mukherjee is now taking time to indulge in small measures. While two international accessory collaborations are in the works, the Sabyasachi beauty business is slowly taking shape, and a new television show is in the pipeline, he’s also looking forward to a food-focused holiday. “I started working pretty early in life, so I’ve done nothing. But now my friends are taking me out. (Colleague) Stephen Bogunia says I’ve lived under a rock all my life and have had no exposure. So, now it’s his responsibility to show me the world and take me to Michelin-star restaurants,” laughs the self-confessed foodie.    

Another short-term dream waiting to bear fruition is a movie that he hopes to helm soon. “I want to focus on my script because I really want to make a movie in the next few years. It’s a story about not selling out and focussing on keeping idealism alive,” says Mukherjee, a struggle he says most of us deal with on a daily basis.  

Reality check

Humility and perspective don’t come easy when you are Sabyasachi Mukherjee. But the idea is not to fall for your own greatness, he professes. “When you have power, success and money, it is very easy to believe in your own story. There’s a moral compass that I keep protected inside me. And one reason I stay away from a lot of people is because I do not want to be told constantly how great I am. It was very easy to lose perspective. If you actually protect that about you then you don’t become bigger than what you do,” he says.

And while over the years, social media has become his brand’s interactive platform of choice, Mukherjee admits that he gave up his fake Instagram “voyeur account” during the pandemic. “I made an active decision to move away from social media, because there is a time when you realise, everybody, no matter how successful they are, is always going to be plagued by a little bit of self-doubt. And the only one who can clear the doubt for you, is yourself. Sometimes not looking into other people’s yards, and only focusing on your own self is the best way to drive excellence,” says the designer. And considering his playground today is a heritage structure completed in 1913 by Gostling Chambers & Fritchley, his toy box is overflowing with India’s finest crafts and treasures, and the world truly is his oyster, he has no trouble minding his own business

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