Amit and Naroop launched The Singh Project in Autumn 2014 and it immediately caught the attention of the public and the press. It was covered by BBC World News, The Huffington Post, The Guardian and The Hindustani Times to name but a few. It is part of a wider change that is taking place in the way Sikhs are being perceived as Lauren Cochrane commented in The Guardian.
‘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.’