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Waris Singh Ahluwalia
Renaissance Man
 To call Waris Singh Ahluwalia a renaissance man would not be an
exaggeration. In his 36 years, he’s attempted to start a music
magazine, organised rave parties, designed opulent jewellery for the
rich and famous and managed to carve out a niche for himself as an
actor, appearing in three major
Hollywood
films under acclaimed directors Wes Anderson and Spike Lee. Waris
was born in
Amritsar, grew up in Brooklyn and now makes his home in
Manhattan’s
Tony West Village. Spare and immaculately put together in a dark
brown suit, black turban and striking Lincoln green leather gloves,
he cuts a debonair figure, even among the hyper-fashionable crowds
of the Village.
He moved from
Amritsar to New York as a fiveyear old and grew up in Bay Ridge,
Brooklyn.
“I was perhaps the only Indian kid in my elementary school, forget
about other Sikh kids,” he says. Growing up in
Brooklyn,
away from the insulating Sikh communities in other parts of
New York,
Waris missed having friends from a similar cultural background. “I
used to attend Sikh camps in the summer and meet Sikh kids from
other parts of the country and what always amazed me was the fact
that here were these kids growing up together with others like them.
I remember, at one point, pleading with my parents to move us to
Maryland so I could hang out with friends I’d made at camp.” College
life, at a small liberal arts college in upstate
New York,
was also somewhat alienating for Waris.
“Again, I was the one of only a handful of Sikh or Indian or even
South Asian students there. I was lazy about wearing my turban,
usually preferring to go to class in a bandanna, partly because it
was easier but also because I guess I didn’t want to stand out so
much at a college where I was the only Sikh student,” he says.
All that changed when Waris took a year abroad at the
University
of Manchester. “I was blown away by the vibrant Sikh culture in
England and being surrounded by so many other young turbaned Sikhs
made me proud and I started wearing my turban everyday.”
After the year abroad, he returned to
New York and after just two job interviews at advertising agencies,
decided that a regular job wasn’t what he wanted. He tried his hand
at various things deciding to channel his love for music into a
career. He attempted to start a music magazine, abandoning that
project a year into it when he realised it wasn’t something he
wanted to do. He then got involved in organizing parties and events,
going out most nights of the week with friends to clubs and
concerts.
“It was here that I got exposed to the
New York art scene, meeting career artists who were doing wonderful,
creative things. So, in many ways this was my real education.”
This led to Waris being involved with the New York Yearbook Project
which was like a high school yearbook for the arts in
New York. “I did a lot of exploring in my 20’s trying many different
things in my 20s trying many different things to find what it is
that I wanted to do with my life. I like to get involved in things
and if they hold me for more than a day, I need to know how it
works.” In the 1990s, while the
U.S. was in the grips of a recession, Waris decided on a lark that
he wanted to wear diamonds.
“It was a kind of gesture of social commentary,” he says. “We were
going through a recession, everyone was complaining about how bad
things were, but I wanted to go the opposite way. So, I contacted a
friend who worked in
New York’s jewellery district and had him make some diamond rings of
my own design for me.” That winter, while in
Los Angeles
escaping the frigid New York winter, Waris went into Maxfield’s, the
exclusive boutique that is frequented by Hollywood stars. The owner
saw the diamond rings Waris was wearing and asked about them.
One thing led to another and Waris walked out of Maxfield’s with an
order for rings just like the ones he was wearing to be delivered
within a week. When he supplied the store with the rings, they sold
out. Pretty soon, they got noticed and written about by the fashion
press and his career as a jewellery designer was born. “When I
started, I had no knowledge of jewellery design,” he says. “I would
just give the craftsmen my sketches and they would give me a
finished piece but because of my natural inclination for needing to
know how things are made, for getting intimately involved with every
project, I jumped into it and learnt the business from the inside
out.”
Today,Waris works with the best craftsmen in
Italy and India to create his acclaimed pieces and they are sold at
the most exclusive stores around the world including at Barney’s,
New York and Collete in Paris under his brand, House of Waris. His
pieces sell from $1200 to $150,000 and although House of Waris
prefers to keep their client list confidential, celebrities like
Kate Hudson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman and Wes Anderson
have been seen sporting Waris’ creations.
Last year, he was among the designers nominated to receive the
prestigious Vogue Fashion Fund Award for young designers. Waris’
acting career started by similar happenstance. In 2003, he was
having dinner with
Hollywood
director Wes Anderson and
Anderson asked him if he would appear in his next movie. “I had no
acting experience but I reasoned that if Wes is asking me to be in
his film; if he is confident that I can do this, then I’m not going
to question his judgment. I’ve never said no to an adventure and
that’s why I agreed.”
Anderson
sent Waris the script and a few weeks later left for Italy for five
months to shoot the critically acclaimed The Life Aquatic with Steve
Zissou.
“I was told how tough being in a
Hollywood production was, how everyone was so hard on you and pushed
you to perform, but my experience was completely the opposite.
Everyone on the set was super-supportive. The cinematographer would
come up to me after the shot and say things like `that was fantastic
... it looked like a Caravaggio painting’ and so on,” he says. And
while shooting the film in
Italy, Waris met his girlfriend of six years, Chiara Clemente, the
daughter of renowned painter Francesco Clemente. They have been
inseparable ever since. Waris has since appeared in two more
Hollywood films - Spike Lee’s Inside Man and The Darjeeling Limited
by Wes Anderson. The multi-faceted man continues to be involved in
films.
He’s worked on Io Sono Amore, an Italian film that premiered at the
Venice
film festival recently and will hit theatres later this year and
Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Undead, an independent film. He
continues to work on his jewellery and plans on introducing two new
categories of products this year under his label, House of Waris.
There are also plans to open the first House of Waris flagship
store. “House of Waris is about working with the best craftsmen in
the world and creating beautiful things,” he says. “Jewellery is
intimate - when it’s made in Old Rome in a cave or in Rajasthan,
there’s a romance to it, a story behind it and I make jewellery
because I want to experience that. More than a jeweller, more than
anything else, first and foremost I’m a storyteller.”
3
February 2010
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