F

span class="inline inline-left">Fashion designer Oscar Lawalata’s “lifelong mission” to mine the wondrous depths of Indonesian culture has turned up some remarkable-looking gems.

In a soft voice with a slight lisp and with an impeccable posture marking him a practitioner of yoga, Oscar Lawalata recalls the first bespoke dress he designed for pop singer Titi DJ back in 1998.

“[It was] an empire-cut dress with a flared skirt using very flowing, floaty material. She was my first client,” he says.

It was the year Oscar opened his first boutique on Jl. Senopati, partnering with high school friend Novie, an aspiring interior designer whose tenun handicrafts were displayed at the rear of the store they shared.

Halfway through his second year of a three-year diploma course in fashion design at ESMOD, a French fashion school with a branch in Jakarta, he was forced to choose between an education and jumping headfirst into the entrepreneurial deep end à la Bill Gates.

The boutique opening was hence an all-or-nothing feat, but he had only achieved half of his dream.

“From the start I was enraptured by Indonesian culture, but to research and to really dig deep was not easy,” he said in an interview at his current boutique, Oscar Lawalata Culture.

“To extract that value we must research. It would have been very expensive for me,” he explained, referencing the inaccessibility of cultural literature and scarcity of book stores back in the day.

“So I started with a ready-to-wear line that tended more toward street style for young people. But all along my dream was to explore Indonesian kain.”

Limited finances and spates of teary arguments with his mother, actress Reggy Lawalata, over his “risky” career choice formed hurdles, but “as time went on I started to see opportunity,” he recalls.

“When I visited a relative in Solo [Surakarta, Central Java] I had the chance to see Batik. And then I was invited to Alor where I examined the ikat. A friend of mine, who happens to be a noble, lives in South Sulawesi and that’s where I discovered bodo.”

Considered one of the oldest forms of clothing in the world and the regional dress of South Sulawesi, the bodo’s square cut barely skims the female figure, yet the colors are anything but subdued: two characteristics that tally perfectly with Oscar’s design philosophy.

“We don’t expose women’s bodies. We don’t expose the body but we expose the personality, and we do that through the variety of colors we use, in the details of each piece, in the cut, the collar and the hem. We don’t want to exploit the female form,” he says. “And that’s why our designs are loose, but loose in the sense of comfort.”

Armed with educational takeaways from his travels – “When I examine a piece of kain, I want to know what the processing was like, how it attained this color, what inspired the motif and where it was made” – Oscar created the brand The Bodo, together with four other brands Ikat, Lokchan and Katunkatunku under his label Oscar Lawalata Culture.

Katunkatunku comprises a collection of dresses made from organic cotton; Lokchan, meanwhile, constitutes Lawalata’s experiments with batik, including an endeavor to create kebaya out of woven batik to make it wearable for everyday use.

Oscar believes that the predilection for sequins and “more is more” predominant in kebaya design today effectively undermines governmental efforts to preserve it.

“What happens is the rendering is too ‘extravaganza’ and that’s fine for TV, to project the image of luxury or create a fad. But this [veneer] causes people to keep their distance. I think it’s a shame; it’s a step back,” he says.

“Foreigners would look at kebaya and wonder what we use it for. Traditional Indonesian wear is still seen as a costume for dance, or a parade or carnival.”

“We have to set parameters,” he says of striking a balance between fidelity toward tradition and temporal permutations in taste toward fashion.

“Batik has already become so diversified that in some cases I can no longer see its true Indonesian roots,” he ponders. “So I believe balance is so important in design. In certain cases the design is simple but the textiles speak volumes; or it’s the motif, colors or details that speak for themselves.”

Oscar’s Spring/Summer 2013 collection is a chef d’oeuvre, seeing him fully embrace the vision that has impelled him since the start of his career.

Rendered almost entirely in crushed silk Batik, there are shift dresses in deep blues and earthy yellows, loose-fitting buttonless blazers with wide lapels and then — at the lower level of the boutique — enclosed lovingly in a warmly lit, wood-shelved nook, hang kebaya in soft pastels and deep blues that temper any skepticism about his mission to convert this form of formal traditional dress into a prêt-a-porter staple.

No sign of itchy, movement-constricting thread mesh here: the crushed silk tempers the plainness of the solid colors – in others the fabric’s same-color brocade adds an understated sheen.

Hanging on a rack set apart from the rest are several kebaya in indigos and violets with rhinestone-encrusted collars — the collection’s sole foray into 3-D detailing. And yet, it is this calculated restraint that lends the pieces that elusive simplicity of which Oscar speaks so reverently.

“My designs are for a woman who is comfortable with her personality and knows her Indonesian-ness — if it’s Indonesian clients we’re talking about,” says Oscar, who has held fashion shows in Chile, Milan, Rome and New York as part of government initiatives to socialize Batik globally.

“And she is also aware of the exclusivity of the simple look. So elegance and luxury don’t have to equal bling-bling. It is simplicity that allows a woman’s beauty to shine.”

In 2009, the British Council selected Oscar to represent Indonesia in the International Young Fashion Entrepreneur Awards in London, where he met British hat designer Justin Smith. It was a concurrence of like minds.

 “He has a strong idealism, the way he perceives his art as not just a fashion commodity,” he says. “He likes to make things by hand and he appreciates the idea of culture.”

Determined to collaborate despite the distance, the two designed their joint collection over Skype: Oscar supplying the outfits and Smith the headgear, before presenting it together at Jakarta Fashion Week 2012.

Although spurred on by an unadulterated, childlike enchantment with his own culture — “My career is part of my self-development, because I don’t work for the money” — Oscar does not lose sight of real-world moorings.

“The business side of design is an important consideration: Because to be able to realize the creative process we have to know how to run a business. But is it just business, straight up? If so, then the result is commercial fashion, which is only concerned with glamor, trends, what’s ‘in’ and making money,” he opines.

“But I don’t do that because anyone can do that. What matters to me is how we identify the essence of Indonesian fashion: the sustainability of the craftsmanship, our tradition and how we can modernize these things without losing our values. That, I believe, is what innovation is about.”

— Photos by Ricky Yudhistira