Behold, London’s campest Christmas tree
Fashion designer Ashish Gupta is behind this year’s London EDITION’s festive fir. Turns out it was inspired by John Waters, bad taste and DIY culture.
One of the best bits about the festive period is getting a decent Christmas tree in, and decorating it to your heart’s content. No one knows that better than the London EDITION: each year, the prolific Soho hotel puts on a Christmas tree display so glamorous and extravagant as to eclipse every other in the city.
Achieving this is no small feat. For the occasion, the EDITION usually enlist a guest to do the honours. This time around, there couldn’t have been a better fit than cult Delhi-via London designer Ashish Gupta, who’s renowned for his vivid use of colour and sequins.
“I wanted the tree to be very camp, exaggerated and a bit nuts in a kind of John Waters way, which is the best way,” he says. “I also wanted it to have a familiarity and to feel welcoming, because the nicest hotels always feel so comforting.”
Hi, Ashish! Tell us all about the idea behind your design for this year’s Christmas tree at the London EDITION…
I wanted the tree to have familiar elements, things I have a particular fondness for – tinsel, for example. Because I grew up in India, tinsel for me is really such an all-year-round-on-everything decoration. You’ll see it on trucks, tea-stalls, temples, everywhere. I wanted every shade and pattern and type of tinsel on the tree, so we joined all these different types and turned it into one long garland. For the tree topper, we made a tinsel dress with a big bow for the fairy, who is holding one end of the patchwork of fairy lights we created to add light and extra sparkles.
How does it reflect your approach to fashion design?
Well I love colour and sparkle, and I have a bit of a maximalist approach to my work in fashion. I also love camp, bad taste, and kitsch. There is so much beauty in kitsch, it is really quite an under-valued thing. And the tree is very analog, which is a reflection of making things by hand, which is what I do in my fashion practice.
What’s your favourite thing about the festive season?
Between Christmas and New Year is the one time I get to not check emails and work stuff, so it’s nice to just hibernate for a bit and do absolutely nothing. I usually spend the Christmas holidays on my own. I love to spend a few days binge-watching some good shows on TV and catching up on my reading, or really just not doing much. It feels like such a luxury.
You used to spend Christmases in India as a kid. What are some of your favourite memories from that time?
One of my aunts gave me a silver tinsel tree when I was a child. I used to really enjoy decorating the tree – Christmas wasn’t really a big thing in Delhi, but I would make fake snow out of cotton wool, and the fairy lights would be strings of plastic strawberries with little lights inside them that used to be very popular in India as wedding decorations. All the baubles were fragile glass, so we always had to be really careful with them. And then I’d usually have a fairy strapped on top – a doll I had as a child that I would make a dress for. My fave was probably the one year I gave her a Mia-Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby haircut and put her in a red knitted woolly gown.
What do you hope to find under the Christmas tree this year?
World peace? Failing that, a good book will do.
