Amidst the creative cityscape of Jodhpur that has long since bustled with design hallmarks, former NIFT graduate and 36-year-old Tarini Singh’s design label, The Cobalt Company stands out as its latest retail affair. Unlike the majoritarian success stories of rebranding and repackaging some long-existing market potentials, Tarini’s initiative takes the colour blue and deploys it to paint innovation in multiple forms. The multi-professional designer combines photographic art with jewelry and accessories to craft her very own fashion and lifestyle line.
What is so unique about The Cobalt Company, as its name suggests, is that Tarini has developed the rare technique of combining the film technique of sun printing or cyanotype with calligraphic sketches to develop fabric prints. What had been invented in 1842 as a film development technique using light sensitivity with sunlight to produce photographic prints and paper soon became the world’s solution to simple and low-cost photocopying. Colloquially referred to as ‘blueprint’ for its original purpose of making architectural blueprints and photograms, cyanotype forms the chief orbit at The Cobalt Company.
Using its lesser-known wonders, Tarini has begun to produce a distinct clothing range on the one hand, and an eye-catching photographic portfolio on the other. For example, she has used this creative medium to develop original photographs of Jodhpur and other architectural or landscape images that she captured during her travels. She also devises cyanotype fabric products such as bags and scarves that are printed using real leaves and flowers.
Tarini provides a brief introduction to her inception as a designer. “I started The Cobalt Company because I wanted to create a brand that is eponymous with my hometown Jodhpur. I studied accessory design in college and pursued my master’s in leather bags and shoe design. So most of my career post-college revolved around working with accessories. Over the years my design language has evolved to be quite simplistic with a focus on futuristic forms, as is evident in my design catalogs”, she says. Apart from being trained to design professionally, Tarini later opted to hone her keen photographic interest into a formal skill. “I always had a keen interest in analog photography and carried a film camera with me at all times. I got the chance to do a short course in analog photography at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, which is where I learned the process of sun printing or cyanotype. It was when I developed my first cyanotype and saw the possibility of developing photographs in blue and white that I knew that I had to explore it further. The particular beauty of this art form is the number of ways in which it can be tweaked so as to get vastly different results!”, she adds.
She combines digitally printed photographs and cyanotype to mix digital and manual double exposure to create a series that Tarini calls Rigid/Fluid. The unmoving properties of her photographic compositions, such as buildings and landscapes comprise the rigid, whereas their dominating botanical skies in cyanotype form the fluid. This particular technique is The Cobalt Company’s signature invention, and Tarini is also beginning to delve into the world of portraiture using this very combination.
While this novel series, as well as the art of printmaking, keep Tarini heavily preoccupied, she hasn’t given up on her foundational grasp of accessory design. This is illuminated in her fine collection of bags, particularly the Martingale bag, a convertible shoulder tote and backpack, and the Saddle weekender, which she has infused with a durable design and versatile strap. These are open to retail and e-commerce via premium fashion websites such as Ogaan, ConsciousCollective.com, and 6degree.
“My objective is to experiment”, Tarini states, a conviction put across so succinctly that one is compelled to ponder over whether they’ll perceive the vast spectrum of colors without halting at blue a little longer. The Cobalt Company, for one, makes it difficult to resist cobalt as blue’s trendiest and most eclectic hue, and one that just got its very own address!