The pattern on the actors’ clothes was invisible in plain sight. There was a revelation at the end of Poor-Box Productions’ Gujarati version of The Vagina Monologues (TVM) at Bombay’s G5A (auditorium) on March 8, 2024. Most in the audience gasped when told about the designs by co-producer Kaizaad Kotwal and couturier Ashdeen Lilaowala. Tactfully woven into the costumes were stylized flowers shaped to resemble the anatomical detail in the title of the show. As Lilaowala told Parsiana on March 22, "We had to be discreet, not loud… intriguing, not sensational… Subtlety was important… After all it is too personal.”
Co-producer and actor Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal told Parsiana on March 22 that when she and her son Kaizaad were getting into preproduction and casting and working on the aesthetic choices, it dawned on her that she should ask Lilaowala to design the costumes for our Gujarati version of TVM (see "Actors as activists,” Parsiana, February 21-March 6, 2024)."I had never met Ashdeen before but I had been a huge admirer of his work and the amazing business he has built… I had no idea if he would agree to design the look for each actor.”
Top: Ashdeen Lilaowala (l) and Kaizaad Kotwal;
above, 4th from l: Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal with
co-actors wearing "subtle, intriguing” designs
When she reached out to him, "he immediately said he’d love to meet and take things further… Kaizaad and I met him at his atelier in Colaba and he was almost instantly on board to working with us. We told him who our actors were and what our needs were as far as the costumes were concerned… He said he’d come back to us with ideas about each actor’s costume.” The actor was "impressed” when Lilaowala asked to read the script to get an understanding of the type of character(s) each actor was playing "so that the costumes could fit those characterizations… It was clear he didn’t just want to throw any kind of clothes at the actors and be done with it.”
Lilaowala told Kaizaad and Mahabanoo that he "wanted to create a motif to appear on the costumes in which was embedded the very essence of the vagina… He said he would come up with a design which on the surface would look like something else within which was embedded this coded imagery.”TVM explores the theme of violence in different forms against women, physical, mental, emotional, body shaming. Scripted by American playwright V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), it is based on 200 interviews she did with women all over the world. The show has, since 2003, been performed in English, Hindi and Gujarati and has raised money for distressed women.