The Gods must be crazy. If they happen to be Manish Arora’s Gods, that is. His latest pop-art inspired collection features Indian deities and apsaras sporting funky florescent shades, sequins and sparkling crystals. Some have eyes that roll. Sharing wall space with them at the designer’s Noida factory are embroidered multicoloured snakes inspired by the game of saamp-sidi, Amar Chitra Katha characters and every imaginable form of desi kitsch.

My senses are still reeling from the assault of colour when a bizarre shape suggestive of an explosion on a hanger catches the eye. The creation from his latest collection, to be showcased at Paris Fashion Week, is a personal favourite of Arora’s. It’s a jacket inspired by a bomb blast, created using the Origami paper-folding technique. The panel in front will have fireworks made in Swarovski, he tells me – the unique Manish Arora touch. The designer laughs and assures me there’s nothing violent about his bomb blast. “It’s just that my clothes have a sense of humour. After all, it’s fashion. It can’t be taken so seriously.”

The Origami bomb-blast jacket comes from the same fervid imagination that recently transformed the female body into an Edenic forest teeming with flamboyant flowers, exotic butterflies and riotously coloured Toucan birds. Titled ‘Life is Beautiful,’ the Spring Summer 2007 collection also flaunted ensembles in prints inspired by cows, turtles, fish, dogs and the human anatomy. Easier on colour, though conceptually edgier was the Winter-Autumn 07-08 Collection themed around space, with a futuristic accent on metallics, geometrics and optical illusion. The current collection for Paris is Arora’s version of Indian pop art with a focus on venyl and plastic elements.

The wealth of references the designer uses and the enormous surprise (or shock) value of his creations – watch parts, microchips, lizards and human skulls – make the designer a Rorschach Test analyst’s delight. What makes that mind tick? Where does he find inspiration? How does he translate his bizarre ideas into sure-shot ramp sizzlers?

My journalistic imperative to find a ‘story’, a pattern and a rationale in Arora’s life is predictably at odds with the free spirit’s instinct to defy ordering and labels. “People have called me too many names. I see my work as individualistic and something that is not easy for others to achieve. I don’t think what I make is crazy. It’s just that it’s not for everybody. It’s for people who want to stand out. People who wear my clothes are very confident when they go out. That’s how I’d explain my style,” says he.

An admirer of Jean Paul Gaultier’s work, Arora does not glorify his profession and treats fashion merely as a medium to express what’s in his mind. “If I had not done fashion, it would have been movies or art.” Interestingly, the commerce graduate got into fashion quite by chance when he happened to apply to National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT). It’s hard to imagine the first time he ever created anything was at NIFT.

The designer says the only common element running through his body of work is his connectedness to Indian culture. “Even my collections that don’t have an Indian theme always have Indian elements and embroideries. Like the Autumn-Winter 07-08 reminds you of a space station but the embroideries are zardozi, phulkari and banarasi.” Famed for his exquisite silk jackets, Arora loves brocade from Benaras. “No one in the world can make fabric like that anywhere else in the world. The Chinese can do everything but they can’t make brocade like us. And they can’t do embroideries like us, so we must understand and exploit the advantages we have.”