Paris Fashion Week: Bollywood meets PopArt in Paris

he Indian designer, Manish Arora, a former star of London Fashion Week, made his Paris debut on Sunday with a collection as dazzling and colorful as a Bollywood movie.Arora, 35, who staged one of the opening shows on the Paris prêt-a-porter calendar, dressed his models in kaleidoscopic embroideries, glittering beadwork and technicolor imagery reminiscent of this month’s Hindu festivals, the Durga Puja and the Ganesh Chaturvadi.One dress, handmade from sequined jigsaw pieces of Swarovski crystals, featured the elephant god, Ganesh. Other jackets, tunics and trousers were applied in silk and crystals with fantasy imagery inspired by a blend of Indian comic books, - Amar Chitra Katha – and the PopArt of the American painter, Roy Lichstenstein.A jacket and shorts ensemble was hand-beaded with a game of snakes and ladders. Metallic henna-ed hands were emblazoned on a white silk shift.Elsewhere, in a nod to the French ready-to-wear federation, which invited him to show in Paris, he showed designs featuring intricate, appliqués of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Montmartre and the pavement café scene.The finale ensemble was a long dress with six foot train, completely covered with 1,500 hand-embroidered and beaded butterflies, which glowed in the dark.