Including a sword-wielding man in his sixties, a smiling boy, a polo player and finger-clicking magician, the male Sikh subjects of The Singh Project are wildly different but they are also united by the signifiers of the religion – the turban. Photographers Amit and Naroop’s exhibition at the Framers Gallery also shows how the look now has a place on fashion’s radar. Dapper young Sikh men in sharp suits are now a mainstay of mainstream street style blogs and Sikh jewellery designer Waris Ahluwalia something of a figurehead starring in Gap adverts and Wes Anderson films.
Sikhs themselves are behind the shift. Along with Amit and Naroop, Pardeep Bahra, the 23-year-old fashion blogger – and Sikh – set up Singh Street Style in 2013, describing himself as the “Sikh sartorialist”. He has since scored himself nearly 35,000 followers on Instagram, modelling gigs with Adidas and Samsung and a line of sweatshirts with a cartoon Sikh character. Amit and Naroop have his seal of approval. “They have done an amazing job bringing out a sense of mystique, magic and beauty in their subjects,” says Bahra. “Coming from a similar line of work I feel this is an excellent way to not only celebrate the image of a Sikh, but to normalise the image of a turban and beard through the eyes of the west.” Normalised perhaps. Fashionable? Definitely.
