Bijoy Jain Let's the Light In
For 30 years, Bijoy Jain has built through light, material, and relentless attention to place.
Read the full story in Justsmile Issue 8, Shaping What's Next.
Photography Vivek Vadoliya
Styling Nikhil Mansata
Text Harris Chowdhary
Bandhgala jacket and shirt RAJESH PRATAP SINGH.
During every monsoon I experienced in India, the billboards were the first to go. Toothpaste ads clawed at by a grinning Cheshire Cat. Frozen food campaigns muddled in the dirt. High-rise towers flapping between dream home and death trap. As their skins peeled back, only skeletons remained, the steel merging into a grid of bamboo-hugging towers under construction. Like billboards, shuttering—the local term for scaffolding—is an armature for aspiration in India’s rapid development.
After 30 years of practice in this context, Bijoy Jain is extremely light on his feet. While the ebb and flow of globalization has left the international celebrities of design moving clumsily through any place that does not resemble the new megacity 3.0, Jain’s Studio Mumbai has quietly done something rarer. Collaborating with local artisans, craftspeople, and citizens in India, Spain, France, Japan, Australia, and the US, the studio’s projects accumulate not as a style, but as an attitude. Developed in close contact with land, labor, and life, the work reflects intense, almost fanatical attention. “There was never a manifesto,” Jain tells me. “If I had known this is what I’d be doing, I would have never begun.”
Shirt RAJESH PRATAP SINGH. Jacket, pants and leather sandals talent’s own.
‘The only work that one has to do is free oneself from prejudice.’ – Bijoy Jain
Just entering his 60s, he is sharply dressed and, at first glance, the classic image of an architect. But his work reads as sumptuous against the monotony of modernization. Jain has the calm, charismatic resolve of someone you might follow across an ocean, toward an idea he’s only just imagined.
Bandhgala jacket and shirt RAJESH PRATAP SINGH.
Read the full story in Justsmile Issue 8, available to order and subscribe here.
Justsmile Issue 8 cover featuring Bijoy Jain. Bandhgala jacket and shirt RAJESH PRATAP SINGH. Pants and Kolhapuri chappals talent’s own.
