Rawayat: Maximalism as Embodied Heritage, Sensory Excess, and Resistance in Contemporary Design
Poulomi Sen
Rawayat talks about duality taking inspiration from my city of New Delhi which has 2 versions that I have witnessed while growing up. The brand does not romanticize or aestheticize this duality from a distance; it is produced from within it, by a designer who grew up in and moves through this city. In the courts of the Mughal Empire, fragrance was more than a scent, it was a language. Inspired by the legacy of Empress Nur Jahan and the ancient artistry of Indian Attar, we create for the intangible.
Rawayat is a conversation between memory and skin; the bridge between
heritage and the present moment. Each bottle is a curated vessel of history,
designed for the feeling that remains when the lights fade.
The story is now yours to wear.
Rawayat Logo
A name rooted in story and heritage, worn as fragrance, carried as memory.
Perfume Bottle Primary Packaging
The exterior of the Rawayat bottle is wrapped in clay which bottle holds the grain of fingerprints, the pressure of specific contacts, the asymmetries of manual making. Every mark on a clay surface is evidence of a body that was present, that exerted force, that left a trace. The structural logic also carries semantic weight. The cap which is the smallest, lightest element, holds the most concentrated, most valuable material. This inversion of scale and value mirrors the attar tradition itself, in which enormous quantities of rose petals are distilled to produce tiny quantities of oil. The form embodies the fragrance's logic. The Rawayat bottle stores concentrated attar in its cap rather than in the bottle's body. This structural inversion reverses the conventional perfume bottle interaction sequence, in which the cap is a closure and the body is the vessel. In the Rawayat object, the cap is the primary functional element, it holds the attar, is applied directly to the skin via a stopper mechanism, and is the component the user reaches for and handles most frequently.
Bottle Cap
Secondary Packaging
Pratt Open Studio - Where all of this started
A participatory workshop titled "Maximalism as a Tool of Subversion: Holding, Shaping, and Seeing Beyond Form" was conducted as part of Pratt Open Studio. The workshop functioned as the primary research method, a living experiment that explored maximalism through touch, instinct, and physical form making before visual analysis.The workshop investigated first-hold instinct, subconscious responses to form, and what constitutes a "maximalist" gesture when stripped of color, text, and graphic elements. By deliberately removing these elements, the workshop isolated the sensory and somatic dimensions of maximalism, foregrounding bodily action as a primary site of meaning-making. Participants of all ages were invited to work with clay under intentionally minimal verbal prompts. The initial instruction "Grab. Don't think." was structured to bypass reflective cognition and access pre-conscious motor responses, echoing design methodologies that privilege felt experience over representational reasoning (Hook et al. 27). Rather than producing visually resolved outcomes, participants engaged with material resistance through grip, pressure, and force, allowing form to emerge from bodily negotiation. As the workshop progressed, prompts shifted from instinctive action toward reflective articulation: "What does maximalism mean without color, graphics, or text?" and "What did your grip dictate?" This transition introduced cognitive discomfort, particularly among participants trained in conventional design processes, revealing a tension between embodied knowing and discursive explanation. The resulting collection of clay forms demonstrated a wide spectrum of gestures: added volume, exaggerated protrusions, irregular textures, directional tension, and asymmetric imbalance. Participants placed their forms on shelves and tables alongside written reflections. The wall of responses itself became a maximalist artifact. Through conversation, participants consistently described maximalism not as decoration but as abstract resistance to a set order.
Pratt Open Studio Set Up
Pratt Open Studio
Pratt Open Studio
