Wendell Rodricks was born in 1960 in Bombay to a Goan-Catholic family. He trained in hotel management, worked as a cruise steward in his twenties, moved to Los Angeles in 1984 to study fashion at FIDM, and returned to India in 1988. In 1993 he founded his label from his family's ancestral home in Colvale, North Goa. He was thirty-three. He remained there, operating from Goa rather than Bombay or Delhi, for the rest of his life.

Goan Minimalism

Rodricks's aesthetic proposition was a deliberate contradiction. Indian luxury fashion in the 1990s was principally bridal couture: heavy, hand-embroidered, ceremonial. Rodricks's collections were the opposite — linen, raw cotton, white, ivory, eucalyptus green, the palette of the Goan monsoon. The silhouettes drew from Portuguese-Goan Catholic ecclesiastical dress, the Kunbi tribal tunic, and Italian resort-wear. The proposition: that Indian clothing did not have to be bridal to be Indian.

“

Goan fashion is the wardrobe of the in-between. It is Portuguese and it is Hindu and it is Catholic and it is Kunbi and it is all of these simultaneously. My work is simply to transcribe that. — Wendell Rodricks, The Green Room (2012)

The Books

Rodricks's 2012 memoir The Green Room is one of the most widely read English-language accounts of the contemporary Indian fashion industry. His second book, Moda Goa: History and Style (2012), is the definitive study of the Goan wardrobe, from the pre-Portuguese Kunbi drape through the sixteenth-century Catholic imposition to the contemporary resort silhouette. The research took seven years.

The Museum

In 2017 Rodricks opened the Moda Goa Museum of Costume and Design, in his ancestral Colvale home — the first dedicated costume museum in India. It houses his research collection of over 800 garments. The museum remains open, operated since his death by his husband Jerome Marrel and the Rodricks family trust.

The Public Life

Rodricks was, from the mid-2000s, the most visibly openly-gay designer in India. His marriage to the French art curator Jerome Marrel, registered in France in 2002 and celebrated publicly in Goa, was the first widely-reported same-sex partnership of any senior Indian creative-industries figure.

He died of a heart attack on 12 February 2020, at his home in Colvale, aged fifty-nine. His label was retired, as per his wishes, rather than continued. His durable argument was geographic: the Indian designer, he demonstrated for twenty-five years, did not have to be in Delhi, Bombay, or Kolkata to contribute to the national conversation. That is a career and a polemic at once.