At a reception in Washington D.C., a diplomat said to her, “Oh, Roma are getting educated, huh?”įashion’s love affair with the Gypsy lifestyle goes back decades, and it hasn’t always been glamorous. In the 1950s, Roma children in Brooklyn were taken from their parents for Catholic re-education, and as recently as 2018, friction between recent Roma refugees and the conservative residents of a small town outside of Pittsburgh provided fodder for one of Tucker Carlson’s racist diatribes at Fox News.Īs a Fulbright Scholar, Grigore still suffers ridicule from people who should know better. There are an estimated one million Roma living here, but fearful of discrimination, they keep a low profile. That historical trauma has followed the Romani to the United States. “I thought just like everyone else, it’s a cool word,” she says. An avid traveler herself, when she was planning the launch of her new fashion line, she decided to call it Gypsy Soul. The Indian-American designer Viji Reddy employs Banjara artisans to hand-embroider many of the products for her artisan home collection, Alamwar, which is sold in dozens of high-end boutiques everywhere from the Hamptons to San Francisco. In fact, the nomadic Banjara are often called “the Gypsies of India.” To this day, their descendants, who you might know as “Gypsies,” share with the Banjara a love of long, colorful skirts, head coverings, and piles of flashy jewelry. Banjara means traveler or wanderer, and about 1,500 years ago, some left India and migrated west, eventually making it to Europe. In a country known for its color and flair, the Banjara people of northwest India stand out for their lush embroidery, long skirts embellished with mirrors and mother of pearl buttons, and heavy silver jewelry hanging from their wrists, their hair, ears, and noses.

Gpsy fashion