A Printed Picture

Designer Mohanjeet Grewal opens up about her childhood, familial relationships, her ties with post-Partition India, and why Paris is home.

- UPASANADAS

Wearing a block-printed shirt with floralprinted pants and a scarf fashioned into a head wrap, German-French actor Romy Schneider sat at a table, smoking, as Helmut Newton photographed her for Marie Claire. In 1972, everything about Schneider’s bohemian chic style was straight out of the Swinging Sixties, as if she’d just returned from a Jimi Hendrix concert. Schneider was dressed by Paris-based Indian designer Mohanjeet Grewal, who had set up shop on the Left Bank, eight years ago. Now almost 60 years later, Grewal’s hair is dyed platinum blonde, and she laughs recalling her faith in herself as a young designer—the first Indian dressmaker in Paris. “I was so foolish,” she exclaims. ‘I thought I could be successful!”

Little over two decades before Grewal set up her shop in Paris, the World War II had torn through the country, in the aftermath of which Dior came up with his structured female silhouette, that unraveled in the Mod era. That was exactly when Grewal entered fashion. “At that time, French women were still going to their tailors and couture houses,” she recalls. “The ready-to-wear market was just opening up.” She arrived with her khadi shirts and khari prints, which were immediately swooped up for magazine editorial spreads, and by actors like Romain Gary and Jean Seberg, who lived right opposite her store. “They were coming all the time,” she says. “They loved me.” 

Barely 14 years old when Partition happened, Grewal remembers how unwilling her father was to leave Lahore until he was consoled that he could come back in two days. “But, of course, nobody could,” she sighs. The family owned a house in Ludhiana, to which they drove surreptitiously—her father and driver trying to conceal their religious identities until they reached and were fed by the Army. “Because my father left in a baby Austin,” she laughs. “And he had bought his radio, his dog, and his white and red horns—you know, poultry! That’s all.”