New York swimwear designer Maayan Sherris's new lookbook, with photos by Mayan Toledano, features four of India's coolest swimming babes
I wanted to find athletes that were off the radar," says swimwear designer Maayan Sherris, who first started her Babes in Bathers series in 2016, with the women's swim team of Columbia University. The motivation behind it: to find real women to wear and model in her athletic, double-layered, technically sound swimsuits, designed to swim, work and move in. Last year, she thought of India, after e-meeting national swimming champion and Mumbaikar, Aditi Dhumatkar, who is a sprinter training at the Padukone-Dravid Centre for Sports Excellence in Bengaluru. A year later, her two-minute video, In pursuit of Excellence, featuring Dhumatkar, Faridabad's Divya Satija (India's fastest 50-metre butterflier), Srishti Nag from Bilaspur (another butterflier) and Trisha Karkhanis (all traning in Bengaluru), sporting her blue-hued swimwear, is now up for release, along with a lookbook as well.
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Shot in a country obsessed with cricket, the video with these fresh, excited female swimmers, is a treat to watch. The girls, whose lean, supple and tall bodies fill the swimsuits well, are smart, opinionated and ambitious. While Dhumatkar likes the pain that comes with training, Nag talks of her grandfather building her a two-lane swimming pool at their home in Bilaspur, after her national-level swimmer father, Vishwajit, made sure she won a medal in a sub-junior competition.
"What excited me about the girls was that they come from diverse backgrounds — Aditi is from a cosmopolitan Mumbai where even her sister swam, Srishti is from a small town with one pool for the entire city, and Divya is from a simple family in Faridabad — but they all wanted to do this as a choice, even though they had no funding. It's great that their parents supported them. I wanted to give a glimpse into their journey, and their ambition to reach the Olympics, despite it being hard in India to be a swimmer," says the 30-year-old New Yorker, who originally came to the Big Apple from Israel to study at Parsons School of Design. "It reminds me of my journey — nobody in my family ever thought of fashion, and there wasn't much money, so I had to get a full scholarship to study here." Her best friend from Parsons, also Israeli, photographer Mayan Toledano, who has shot the campaign pictures and directed the video, agrees with what Sherris says. "This combination of independence, and family values is what drew us in. They have both — ambition and support."
The girls themselves are very comfortable with their reality — women trying to succeed at a niche sport in a country with very few avenues. As Dhumatkar says, "I started swimming only eight years ago, that's pretty late for a swimmer, and there weren't any scholarships or anything. But it's too late to change into anything. I have been swimming all my life. I have a swimmer's body, and I am always tanned, and my shoulders are broad.
This is it," says the 27-year-old, "If there was one thing I could tell my eight-year-old self, that would be, keep enjoying it. You are going to be in for the journey of your lifetime." Nag, who would spend days practising in her two-lane pool, kept the swimming up by reminding herself that she is special. "When kids teased me in school for missing all the fun stuff, I just told them it was because I was special," she laughs over the phone from Bengaluru. For Satija, though, swimming changed the way she lived her life. The daughter of a travel agency businessman and housewife from Faridabad, the 23-year-old was low on confidence. "I would have never worn a swimsuit, had I not been swimming. I was very shy. I couldn't even do this call with you!" she says, "So the video was so special for me, as it shows how far I have come. I have completely changed a person, and have the confidence to face anything."
Sherris's idea of using athletic and fit, not thin, girls for her campaigns also talks of her urge and need to make "ordinary" women feel special. "It's completely about body positivity, and performance. It's about being comfortable and being functional in the water, all as you blend in with the water." What stood out for Sherris was that the girls ended up styling themselves. "They were so individualistic. I loved that. They mixed and matched separates like pros." Toledano too, has always aimed at promoting diversity in general through her work.
Swimmers Aditi Dhumatkar, Divya Satija, Srishti Nag and Trisha Karkhanis
One of her most popular works had her photographing the women of the Israeli Defence Services. The video was all about making the girls feel comfortable in their skin. "This was not modelling. This was them letting us into their world, and hearing their stories. I wanted to shoot them the way they were most comfortable — laughing, chatting. And I hope what people take away from it is be inspired by these girls — who are doing this not for prestige, but for inner belief. They don't want validation, they just want to believe in themselves. And that's a very powerful thing."
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