Runway Square X Gucci | Love Links – An Anthology

Love binds. Love liberates.
Love is blue, green, and fuchsia. Love is colourless, eternal.
Love is singing songs on mismatched tunes. Love is the most harmonious tune.
Love is light as a feather. Love is our rock.
Love takes every shape it’s poured into. Love can’t be bound or restricted.
Love hides in discreet corners. Love does a regal pomp and show.
Love is a tumultuous rainy day. Love is a shelter on that rainy day.
Love was, is, and always will be.

As an ode to love, and a celebration of Gucci’s first-ever fine jewelry collection launch in India, Link To Love, we explore the many different bonds shared amongst friends, father and daughter, artists, collaborators, or with our own selves through Runway Square X Gucci LOVE LINKS Anthology wherein we tell five beautiful stories to honour these connections. We live multiple lives in a lifetime, but love was, is, and always will be there – and that’s why this anthology puts a spotlight on the lesser-known, yet enduring connections shared by these known faces.

The Sisterhood Of ‘Firgun’ ft. Tillotama Shome & Kalki Koechlin

The world knows them as doyens of their art, creative extraordinaires, and cultural icons. But beyond that, in an industry that is constantly pitting women against each other, Kalki Koechlin and Tillotma Shome have nurtured a friendship of honesty, respect, and immense love. Their bond is that of sisterhood, of being each other’s emotional safety net, even disagreements and differences but also of learning and growing together. From the pomp and glamour of the sets to the caravan lifestyle of the stage to being each other’s rock, Kalki and Tillotama’s relationship has traversed professional work events, sharing a stage, heart-to-hearts over whiskey to now being entertainers to Kalki’s little one, Sappho. Of their sisterhood, Tillotama says, “What a powerful, nourishing force the solidarity of women can be!”

Click here to read the complete interview with Tillotama Shome and Kalki Koechlin.

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For The Love Of Stories ft. Zoya Akhtar

If Zoya were a voice in a room, it would be one that reverberates and rings through every corner. If you got talking to her, other voices around would evaporate, and only hers would sound true, honest, and unruffled. She sits with a not-so-quiet determination, an envy-inducing self-surety in that voice.

She comes from a family of storytellers and visionaries, stalwarts in their own right, and amidst it, all was her own story, every word chosen with precision, building and budding into a narrative that was never heard before, never experienced before; a medium to travel through emotions, space, and even time.

It was only a matter of time before her voice travelled far and wide, like a message blowing in the wind, touching hearts, striking chords, and stirring more stories. She sees it as her own puzzle—infinite, with pieces unexpected and sometimes initially hard to fit, but they always find a place. As much as people find solace in it, it’s her heart that rides the crests and troughs of its raging passion and infectious excitement. A privilege, she says, to wield a sway in people’s thoughts. 

And she simply isn’t a storyteller of borrowed tales. She crafts them, molds them in shapes we see around us but don’t notice, and colours them in shades you would want to wrap around yourself. The atom of every story is the way she sees her world, a vision unlike any other. 

Before you know it, she has enraptured you in one of her many worlds. You’re amongst people you’ve never met but whose stories are yours, relationships you have shared, feelings you have felt, and a journey you had always anticipated. 

And the room you found her in? She has moved on to the next, in search of a new piece to her puzzle, yet another story.

Click here to read the complete interview with Zoya Akhtar.

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Love Is A Spotlight ft. Sushant Divgikar

They say that the world is your stage. But for Sushant Divgikar, the stage is his world. From the nascent age of 5 years, Sushant had made the stage his home, and the title of a dedicated performer a formative part of his identity. Ever since, Sushant’s story and his journey as a drag icon has been no less than a fiction that you can’t keep down. It is a story as much of all the pomp and glory of show lights as they are of quiet revelations and a will of steel.

But as Sushant’s heart opened to the possibilities of his growth as a person, so did the voices of apprehension and judgement around him. But, the spotlights shone brighter on his ipseity and his selfhood with all its beautiful eccentricities than they ever could on the fingers that were pointed at him. The stage was sometimes his battlefield, and sometimes his safe haven, a refuge, a shelter, and home to his drag queen alter-ego Rani KoHEnur who, as he says, contains all that he as Sushant sometimes can’t. She is the beatific synergy of the male and the female, and an epitome of the futility of the boundaries etched in both through social norms.

Rani KoHEnur is a nonpareil performer, she is confident, a ‘kween’ in all its might and glory, and a force to be reckoned with both on and off stage. Whether Sushant has molded her or she Sushant, is a conversation gone futile for it is in their unison that every unforgettable performance takes place, an experience, a documentary of time freezing as Rani KoHEnur walks under the spotlight, while being ushered words of cheer and praise by Sushant Divgikar.

Click here to read the complete interview with Sushant Divgikar.

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The Sound Of Friendship ft. Imaad Shah & Saba Azad

What started as an actor-director equation is now a friendship that has seen memorable events and tours across the world. Behind the inimitable energy on stage, the visually captivating performances, and auditory surprises of Madboy/Mink is a bond that’s as true and uplifting as the music they make. Yet, Saba and Imaad’s relationship is a celebration of each other’s differences that make for the missing pieces of the puzzle in their musical journeys. Her tunes need his technical prowess, his knowledge needs her instincts, she preps for the stage in silence, while he rehearses and relies on food – to deliver a performance together that offers a peek into their ever-stretching horizons; their music grows, and so does their friendship. They’re as much cheerleaders to each other’s big and small victories, as they are a part of it.

Click here to read the complete interview with Imaad Shah and Saba Azad.

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The Click Of A Heartbeat ft. Avani & Raghu Rai

Photographs freeze moments in time. It is a note from the past to the future about the transient nature of the presence. It is a flat shiny piece of paper. It is a JPeg file. It is a social media post. It is what you make of it. But for Avani Rai, her childhood abounds in photographs. Black and white and coloured memories of her father—in a ghat in Varanasi or catching seagulls in flight in Delhi with his discerning lens—are what have molded her, only for her to lose herself in images all over again as a photographer. And her first project was to capture her father Raghu Rai, a widely-celebrated photographer, in the very frame that shaped her artist self. Much like her father, Avani’s eye is for the world, as they are of the world.

Click here to read the complete interview with Avani and Raghu Rai.

`~fin~

CREDITS:
Editor + Creative Director: Charu Gaur
Photographer + Videographer + Art Director: Pretika Menon
Stylist: Ekta Rajani
Junior Editor + Creative Assistant: Karishma Gulyani
Make-up: Jean-Claude Biguine India + Nisha Singh / T.R.A.C (For Zoya Akhtar)
Hair: Jean-Claude Biguine India + Dianne Commissariat / BBlunt India (For Zoya Akhtar)
Manicure: Jean-Claude Biguine India
Text: Shubhanjana Das
Styling Assistant: Swity Shinde
Photography Assistant + Photo Editor: Karan Sarnaik
Music: JBABE / Third Culture
Set Designer:  Jangu Sethna
Production House: Anomaly Production Pvt. Ltd.
Artworks: Shaista Syed / Kitsuné India