
Get your cues for ocean-inspired fashion here
We are a little over a week away from celebrating World Ocean's Day that is celebrated annually on 8 June. The central theme for the year is 'Sustainable Fishing Means More…" to raise awareness about sustainable fishing practices that will ensure the 'the health and abundance of marine resources for generations to come" states the Marine Stewardship Council. As conversations around protecting our oceans continue to gain ground year on year, it would also be timely to talk about how the expansive ocean and the marine life it holds in its depths have inspired fashion designers over the years. The 'mermaidcore' aesthetic that comes in iridescent colours and uses motifs of seashells and clams and pearls was a popular micro-trend a few years back. But every year, the refreshing tones of the ocean, from sea green to deep blue, and fascinating sea life including seahorses, starfishes, dolphins, whales, clown fishes and even sea weed have all been embroidered, stitched, moulded or painted onto multiple silhouettes. Lounge's round up shows you how you can add elements of marine life to add a splash of whimsy and joy into your wardrobe.
Also read: Want to add a touch of Art Deco to your wardrobe? Here's some inspiration
MANTA TIME
Seiko's limited edition range seeks to raise money for ocean conservation efforts. What better way to have fun with this than with the iconic Seiko Turtle dive watch with an engraved blue dial featuring Manta Rays? Available on Watchfactory.in; ₹54,000.
MERMAID MODEL
Inspired by amorphous glowing marine forms, this top by designer Amit Aggarwal is meticulously crafted in handwoven metallic polymer. Pair the top with pants or a fitted skirt for a statement-making look. Available on Ensembleindia.com; ₹54,500.
HELLO NEMO
If you are a fan of the movie, Finding Nemo here's a bag you'll find irresistable. This sea creature-inspired bag from label Anya Hindmarch has a recycled-satin base, leather trims, fin-shaped drawstrings and is embellished with pink and lime paillettes and crystal-encrusted eyes. Available on Anyahindmarch.com; ₹1.14 lakh.
SHE SELLS 9 SHELLS
Nothing screams ocean-inspired fashion louder than accessories adorned with shells. Exude chill beach babe vibes with this necklace from Chloé crafted in vintage gold brass features nine shell pendants in various shapes around a short chain. A logo plate finishes this piece. Available on Chloe.com; ₹1.06 lakh.
Also read: Monsoon style: Boots and brollies
BEACH-CODED
If you are a beach person, your holiday wardrobe should have a few pieces of clothing with sea-inspired prints and patterns. Like this Versace gathered, stretch-jersey midi skirt. Featuring Barocco elements with coral, starfish and shell motifs and Medusa '95 hardware on the front wrap panel, pair it with a matching top or a white tank top. Available on Mytheresa.com; ₹53,366.
FISH FACE
Crafted from glass, this quirky water green-hued jar seems life-like thanks to features like a set of fins and texture to resemble scales. Use it to store sweets or as a decorative feature and add some quirky humour into your home decor. Available on Polspotten.com; ₹12,503.
DIVE BOMB
Whether you are swimming in a pool in your apartment or bathing in the sea, a little element of fashion by way of swimming trunks is always a good idea. This pair of swim shorts with drawstring waist and all-over sea animals pattern from Emporio Armani is a neat addition. Available on Armani.com; ₹10,580.
BEAD THE WAY
Starfish are fascinating creatures - they are not fish, don't have brains or blood and can live up to 35 years. They also make for pretty motifs on any item of clothing or shoes. This pair of Valentino Garavani espadrilles crafted with fabric upper and leather lining look even more lively thanks to the neon-pink beaded starfish embellishments. Available on Mytheresa.com; ₹51,170.
Also read: Indian women's power dressing awaits a makeover
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Mint
17 hours ago
- Mint
Can't recall a person's name? You are not alone
Kartik Parija prides himself on his elephantine memory, yet lately, names have begun to slip away. 'I've had moments when I reconnect with someone from the pre-internet days, vividly recall our shared history but momentarily blank on their name," says the 49-year-old entrepreneur from Bengaluru. He recalls awkwardly steering such conversations without naming the person, while his mind scrambles to retrieve that 'fundamental piece of personal connection". This lapse has emerged only in the past three years, he says. 'It feels profoundly strange, like the fuzzy confusion after pulling an all-nighter before an exam." Don't chalk it up to age. Screenwriter Shoaib Zulfi Nazeer has noticed this since his mid-20s. 'Back in school and college, everyone was a peer, and you heard names so often that remembering them was easy. After I moved to Mumbai in 2018 and started approaching people online for networking, I realised I struggled with remembering names," says the 32-year-old from Roorkee. Nazeer has co-written dialogues for movies like Three of Us (2022) and Superboys of Malegaon (2024). The common thread in their experience of forgetting names is the influx of digital communication. Both describe how the flood of information has fragmented attention so much that even after regular, sometimes deep, conversations with people, they find it hard to fully register or retain that primary detail about a person: their name. As communication shifts from verbal to textual in the digital age, we interact with far more people at once. But the cues have changed: instead of calling a name out loud, we open chatboxes after seeing someone's content in a feed, type a few letters before their name auto-fills in a messaging app, or scroll to their chat in the inbox and ping them directly. The act of saying or mentally repeating a name has diminished, perhaps explaining why names slip from memory mid-conversation. Also read: Neeraj Ghaywan on 'Homebound': 'If I don't tell my stories, who will?' Mumbai-based neurologist Siddharth Warrier explains how a name carries auditory, visual (tied to a person's face), and emotional cues, each stored in different areas of the brain and woven together during recall. 'The more sensory hooks you attach to a name, the stronger your ability to remember it," he says. Digital communication creates a kind of 'sensory blindfolding," explains Warrier, often reducing people to flat, two-dimensional entities and depriving the brain of the multi-sensory input needed to anchor a name in long-term memory. Digital communication has given rise to a kind of cognitive offloading, or a shift of information and mental effort to a source outside the brain. Just as we stopped memorising phone numbers once our phones began storing them, we now rely on devices to remember names. Lounge spoke to a dozen people across age groups and professions, and each admitted to scrolling through old chats or mutual groups to look someone up because they couldn't recall their name. This reliance on digital memory is often shaky as names on social media and messaging platforms are frequently pseudonymised—so you tend to see people's social media handles instead of their actual names, or the names are initialised, and display pictures are kept blank for privacy. Pune-based communication coach Junie George Varghese, 44, found herself stuck when she couldn't recall someone's name and scrolled through a WhatsApp group's member list for clues but ended up finding two similarly named contacts. 'They had similar first names, and I didn't remember their surnames either. With no profile pictures, there was no way I could confirm which of them was my person." M.V. Radhakrishna, a 48-year-old cloud computing professional from Hyderabad, recalls a friend calling him for help identifying a former classmate who had responded to his post in their school WhatsApp group. 'The profile only showed this person's initials instead of the full name, and my friend could recognise our friend from the display picture but still not place their name," he says. It is possible for you to struggle with recalling the names of people you have interacted with intensely in the past, says Warrier. 'The neural pathway of our brain's recall network gets rusted. But once you oil it, it kicks back into gear." However, the more stressed you are, the harder it is for the brain to retain and recall things, he says, because the stress makes the brain redirect its resources elsewhere. Memory retrieval in the digital age has shifted from being person-focused to content-driven, says Shaheena Attarwala, a product design manager based in Bengaluru. 'People reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I often forget their names or the companies they're from. But I'll remember the theme of our conversation and end up searching for keywords from the chat instead," says the 38-year-old. These are ongoing conversations where she has an incentive to remember the names: like someone who invited her to an offsite of peers. She has actively engaged in conversation with these people and yet struggles to recall their names. It reflects a broader shift in how we engage now: the person has become a means to an end, while the content is the end. In a world where content dominates screen space, especially in short-video formats, names, often reduced to usernames or handles, are relegated to the margins, literally and metaphorically. On Instagram Reels, even a user's identity is minimised. Their handle, not even their real name, appears in small text tucked away in the bottom-left corner of the screen. It's the 'TikTokification of conversations", says Attarwala, where the story matters more than who's telling it. 'I do glance at the names of people posting on my feed before I like or comment, but a few minutes later, I often can't recall who it was," admits Daksh P. Jain, 21, a visual designer and software developer from Delhi. 'Social media and digital relationships have made people think that other people are disposable, so to speak. It's easier than ever to forget people because digital communication reduces a person to their contribution," he says. Yet, digital communication, for all its flaws, can offer unexpected advantages when it comes to memory retention. 'On WhatsApp, for instance, the person's name is constantly visible at the top of the chat, which helps reinforce it passively," says neurologist Warrier. 'In contrast, during an in-person conversation, even if the exchange is meaningful, a name might be mentioned only once, right at the start, and never again, which can make it harder to retain." Mumbai-based behavioural scientist Anand Damani points out that name recall during first-time face-to-face meetings can be especially tricky. 'Your brain is busy taking in so many cues—Do I like this person? Can I trust them?—that the name often doesn't register," he explains. Sometimes, the issue isn't memory failure but selective attention, argues Nazeer with a personal insight: 'I've often found myself asking someone their name, but instead of hearing their answer, I'm already thinking about the next question to ask them." It's not out of rudeness, he clarifies. 'It's just that I'm processing so much information every day that the small-talk phase feels expendable. I'm always in a hurry to get to the part of the conversation that matters. So it's not that my brain forgets. It's that it consciously chooses to treat certain information, like names, as disposable." Radhakrishna has created an open-source people tracker tool where he saves notes about a person directly on to a Google Sheet. 'As a solutions architect, I have to read and research a lot. Rather than just bookmarking articles by experts, I use my blog to jot down short notes and connect people with something to remember them by," he adds. Warrier says that any effort to actively remember things, whether it's names, directions, or phone numbers, has neurological benefits. He recommends attaching value and context to names to better retain them. Merely repeating the name again and again during a conversation will make it stick further in your brain while also making the other person feel seen. Some people tend to add context like where they met someone while saving their contact digitally, notes Warrier. 'Memory works like a network: the more you engage it, the stronger it becomes. And remembering names in particular helps reinforce our social memory, making it easier to maintain and navigate relationships," he adds. Why do parents and grandparents often mix up the names of their children and grandchildren? 'That happens because of adjacent memory retrieval," he says. 'Like how you might struggle to remember an actor's name, but you'll remember the name of a movie he's been in because those memories are stored in relation to each other." Perhaps then it's not always overstimulation or indifference that leads to a name slipping away from someone's mind. It's all very Shakespearean to say, 'What's in a name"? But, as Avneet Kaur, a 27-year-old counselling psychologist from Bengaluru, points out, it doesn't feel that way when you are at the receiving end of this lapse in memory. 'When someone forgets ours, it can feel like a failure to recognise us as a person. Like we didn't matter enough for them to remember," she says. 'When someone does remember your name, it signals that you meant something to them. Our names often carry heritage, meaning, and emotional history. Losing that can flatten how we see each other." In the endless scroll of faces and handles, where identities are often reduced to metadata, remembering someone's name might just be the most human thing we can do. Also read: Why it's important to give the kids a glimpse of your younger self


Time of India
a day ago
- Time of India
The making of India's first ‘fairytale palace of modernism'
In place of a turban, a safari hat crowns the Maharaja's head. As if weary of pearls and emeralds, the Maharani wears a glowing smile instead. The striking black-and-white photo of Indore's royal couple in their minimalist chic—he in sunglasses and a blazer, she beautiful and jacketed—was taken in 1933 by a German architect who understood their flair for understatement. By then, Berlin-based Eckart Muthesius had spent over three years building the young couple a sleek palace without a dome, a "temple of avant-garde" that was India's first centrally air-conditioned home. Even as external affairs minister S Jaishankar recently flew to Germany to strengthen diplomatic ties, an exhibition in Mumbai is showcasing a much older dialogue between the two nations, albeit in the realm of architecture. Sepia images on the walls of the Kamalnayan Bajaj Gallery in Byculla's Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum trace the century-old friendship between Yeshwant Rao Holkar II of Indore, his wife Sanyogita, and Muthesius—a bond that gave India one of its earliest modernist buildings: Manik Bagh. Commissioned in 1930 by the maharaja, who met Muthesius in Oxford in the 1920s, "Manik Bagh was far ahead of its time," says the show's curator Raffael Dedo Gadebusch, who heads the Asian Art Museum in Berlin. "The palace was a synthesis of architecture, arts, and design like hardly any other building in that period," he adds, comparing it to The Bauhaus, the steel-and-glass art school designed by Walter Gropius in 1926. Art Deco buildings were just beginning to bloom on Marine Drive in 1933 when the palace—designed in the International Style—was dubbed a "fairytale palace of modernism". Alongside watercolours, drawings, and design studies by Muthesius, the show features 50 rare photographs by Muthesius, German photographer Emil Leitner, and American visual artist Man Ray. Sourced from collections loaned by art patrons Taimur Hassan and Prahlad Bubbar, the images highlight curated objects from the palace, crafted by avant-garde designers who shared Muthesius's minimalist vision, such as Constantin Brancusi. His iconic 'Bird in Space'—a sculpture the Maharaja bought in black marble, white marble, and bronze—are seen soaring in the maharaja's living room, in vintage prints. The palace's readymade furniture—like the tubular steel chaise longue by Le Corbusier and red armchairs by Wassili and Hans Luckhardt —reflected the jazz-loving Maharaja's admiration for the democratic ideals embedded in modernist design. "He was consciously moving away from colonial aesthetics," points out Gadebusch. "Technically, it was a marvel," says the curator about the palace, whose water faucets, staircase banisters, light fixtures, and retractable awnings were all produced in Germany as per Muthesius's strict specifications. Instead of wallpaper, the walls were painted with pigments mixed with glass or metal particles. Doors and windows employed steel frames and thick tinted glass—unprecedented in Asian architecture. Over time, the palace evolved to blend beauty and utility, featuring innovations such as clear and tinted glass panes set in metal frames, India's first air-conditioning system, pictorial carpets, and vibrantly coloured walls. "My father put his foot down on only one major design element," wrote Shivaji Rao "Richard" Holkar, the Maharaja's son from his third marriage. "Muthesius wanted a flat roof, in line with the modernist idiom of Le Corbusier, but my father insisted it wouldn't withstand the monsoon. Muthesius relented, designing a sloped roof with custom-made green ceramic tiles. International acclaim followed its completion in 1933. The palace became a showcase for modernist masterpieces, and Muthesius was appointed 'Chief Master Builder' of Indore. However, after the abolition of the privy purse, Manik Bagh found several of its furnishings auctioned off by Sotheby's. These included an aluminium-and-chrome bed with built-in glass bookshelves, for which designer Yves Saint Laurent made a bid. Stripped of his power and forced to adjust to a new socio-political landscape after independence, the Maharaja of Indore married twice more before passing away in Mumbai at age 53. Some years later, Manik Bagh Palace passed over to the govt, and its once eclectic European furnishings were replaced with Godrej cupboards filled with bureaucratic files. The former home of a couple who once enjoyed tax-free govt stipends now serves as the headquarters of the central GST and excise commissioner. When the Maharaja's Mumbai-based grandson, Yeshwant Holkar, visited Manik Bagh last year to invite the commissioner to an exhibition, he found the palace in a state "not befitting of its history or importance." "It's important that govt officials are made aware of its heritage so that any renovations are sensitive to its legacy," says Holkar, who believes the palace could thrive as a museum or a design institute. "Given its global reputation as a modernist icon, the govt could do far more with it. The ball is in its court."


Mint
a day ago
- Mint
Get your cues for ocean-inspired fashion here
We are a little over a week away from celebrating World Ocean's Day that is celebrated annually on 8 June. The central theme for the year is 'Sustainable Fishing Means More…" to raise awareness about sustainable fishing practices that will ensure the 'the health and abundance of marine resources for generations to come" states the Marine Stewardship Council. As conversations around protecting our oceans continue to gain ground year on year, it would also be timely to talk about how the expansive ocean and the marine life it holds in its depths have inspired fashion designers over the years. The 'mermaidcore' aesthetic that comes in iridescent colours and uses motifs of seashells and clams and pearls was a popular micro-trend a few years back. But every year, the refreshing tones of the ocean, from sea green to deep blue, and fascinating sea life including seahorses, starfishes, dolphins, whales, clown fishes and even sea weed have all been embroidered, stitched, moulded or painted onto multiple silhouettes. Lounge's round up shows you how you can add elements of marine life to add a splash of whimsy and joy into your wardrobe. Also read: Want to add a touch of Art Deco to your wardrobe? Here's some inspiration MANTA TIME Seiko's limited edition range seeks to raise money for ocean conservation efforts. What better way to have fun with this than with the iconic Seiko Turtle dive watch with an engraved blue dial featuring Manta Rays? Available on ₹54,000. MERMAID MODEL Inspired by amorphous glowing marine forms, this top by designer Amit Aggarwal is meticulously crafted in handwoven metallic polymer. Pair the top with pants or a fitted skirt for a statement-making look. Available on ₹54,500. HELLO NEMO If you are a fan of the movie, Finding Nemo here's a bag you'll find irresistable. This sea creature-inspired bag from label Anya Hindmarch has a recycled-satin base, leather trims, fin-shaped drawstrings and is embellished with pink and lime paillettes and crystal-encrusted eyes. Available on ₹1.14 lakh. SHE SELLS 9 SHELLS Nothing screams ocean-inspired fashion louder than accessories adorned with shells. Exude chill beach babe vibes with this necklace from Chloé crafted in vintage gold brass features nine shell pendants in various shapes around a short chain. A logo plate finishes this piece. Available on ₹1.06 lakh. Also read: Monsoon style: Boots and brollies BEACH-CODED If you are a beach person, your holiday wardrobe should have a few pieces of clothing with sea-inspired prints and patterns. Like this Versace gathered, stretch-jersey midi skirt. Featuring Barocco elements with coral, starfish and shell motifs and Medusa '95 hardware on the front wrap panel, pair it with a matching top or a white tank top. Available on ₹53,366. FISH FACE Crafted from glass, this quirky water green-hued jar seems life-like thanks to features like a set of fins and texture to resemble scales. Use it to store sweets or as a decorative feature and add some quirky humour into your home decor. Available on ₹12,503. DIVE BOMB Whether you are swimming in a pool in your apartment or bathing in the sea, a little element of fashion by way of swimming trunks is always a good idea. This pair of swim shorts with drawstring waist and all-over sea animals pattern from Emporio Armani is a neat addition. Available on ₹10,580. BEAD THE WAY Starfish are fascinating creatures - they are not fish, don't have brains or blood and can live up to 35 years. They also make for pretty motifs on any item of clothing or shoes. This pair of Valentino Garavani espadrilles crafted with fabric upper and leather lining look even more lively thanks to the neon-pink beaded starfish embellishments. Available on ₹51,170. Also read: Indian women's power dressing awaits a makeover