Working on Mughal Miniatures

Simron Sabri is Sonia Sabri Company’s resident Costume Designer. Using nothing but her bare hands, her needle and her creativity, she sourced the fabrics in an environmentally friendly manner, and crafted the Mughal Miniature masterpieces we see touring around the UK today. Read more about her sewing expertise and creative insight into creating the Mughal Empire inspired costumes.

The beginning and inspiration for the costumes…
‘Mughal Miniatures is a production that was inspired by the Mughal Empire specifically their miniature paintings which included such detail and illustrated the best part of their lives.

For costume inspiration in terms of style I looked at Angarkhas and different styles that were worn during the period. Angarkhas is believed to have originated from Sanskrit from the word ‘Angarakshak’ and is traditionally worn by men in India as an over garment.

So, I looked at Mughal Miniature paintings as well as a very famous film called ‘Jodha Akbar’ that is based on Emperor Akbar and their costumes are absolutely beautiful. I looked at their costume designer Nita Lulla who spent a year and a half, researching and developing Mughal costumes simply because of the volume of details and attention it had to them.

Key thing I wanted to achieve were to represent each character through colour, embellishment and shapes of costumes as well as historic representation of the era, and the most important part, then being comfortable to dance and tour in.

Sourcing of the costumes and environmental sustainability
To source the costume for Mughal Miniatures, I used a mix of past production costumes as well as old sarees and old fabrics, as well as newly bought fabrics.

The main challenge to create a dance costume is to have something that is well fitting and compliments their (dancers) body shape as well as being able to last for long tours and being comfortable enough to dance in. Other challenges of using second hand fabrics are that sometimes they can be worn out, have stains or they can easily tear. We can fix this by cutting fabrics in a certain way and using enforcements like fastenings or facings and lining fabrics.

I feel through the experience of making dance costumes, you get the gist about what is required. For example, with fastening, securing seems, securing stitches and adding ‘gusset’, (an extra panel that expands and contracts as needed) without changing the shape of a garment and without changing the measurements.

What I enjoyed about using second-hand fabrics is it’s honestly just bringing something back to life and creating really cool designs with them and I would one hundred percent do it again.

Environmental sustainability is very important because there’s so much wasted in the fashion/costume industry, simply because the costumes are usually specifically painted to a certain brief. At SSCo, we use our costumes over and over again for multiple productions to give the garments their fullest lives, and we also adapt our costumes to fit new briefs.

Adapting the costumes
Adapting Kathak costumes for the Mughal Miniature I found quite simple because the costumes and clothing were very similar, simply because Kathak dance was around during the time of the Mughal era and Mughal Empire influenced a lot in terms of languages, food, clothing and paintings.

What I love about creating costumes for SSCo is that I’m able to represent my culture, South Asian Heritage, while also inserting a contemporary twist into my designs to represent Modern Britain.’