On a big night in their musical life, Chani Nattan and Inderpal Moga gave a Surrey shout-out with the styling help of a Sullivan-area clothier.
At the JUNO Awards in March they wore suits designed by Modello Bespoke's Danny Bassi with twin phrases printed on the linings: “Nice Day in the Pind," or "village" in Punjabi.
"It turned out amazing and we got a really good response because we went super-custom on it," Nattan said of that night in Vancouver. "Everybody appreciated it when we opened up (the jackets) to show the inlay and it had the name of our album on there. On the red carpet it was like taking a part of Surrey with us, we showed that love."
JUNO nominees Nattan and Moga are longtime friends and clients of Bassi, who has made a name for Modello dressing high-profile Indo-Canadian musicians.
"We've done AP Dhillon and Karan Aujla, also a JUNO-winner last year," Bassi noted. "Actually we made his engagement suit years ago, and afterwards I saw his video — I had heard his music but didn't know his face. I was like, 'Oh, that's Karan Aujla!' After that I made a couple of suits for him, including his wedding suit."
This year Nattan and Moga were nominated for the JUNOS' inaugural South Asian Music Recording of the Year Award (won by Dhillon) and got to perform at Rogers Arena with Jazzy B in one of the most colourful, electrifying moments of the night.
In Edmonton a business trip, Bassi was thrilled to watch on TV and see the reaction on social media, though Nattan and Moga wore other clothes for their on-stage performance.
"It's a big boost in credibility when you start dressing people like them, known figures," he said.
The red-carpet suits had to be crafted quickly, just a few weeks.
"They said they were nominated and were going to perform at the awards, so we came up with something," Bassi recalled. "Luckily the timing was right because we work with a lot of mills in England and Italy and they send us semiannual fabric collections. We had just received the spring/summer stuff, so we had those swatches. We had to represent their style. It couldn't be just a plain black tux."
Bassi's business began as an entrepreneurship class project at UBC's Sauder school. With little knowledge of the clothing industry, he saw an opportunity to grow a business making custom suits "in an approachable way," he says.
"I was working at TD at the time, a couple of my friends there I measured, sent an order to a tailor in India, got the suit back, hated it, made a few more suits, and then slowly kind of just got the ball rolling," Bassi recalled.
"In those first few years I was mobile, driving to peoples' houses, then people would come to my house — my parents' house, I should say," he continued. "I had an office on King George, and actually that's where I met Chani for the first time, around 2015. Both of us were young guys starting out, and he hadn't starting doing music yet. He was known for comedy, just a funny guy with a following (on social media)."
At the Modello showroom, Nattan and Moga recently filmed their parts of the "Best Friend" video made with British group Girls Like You.
"Things like that, people notice," Bassi said. "When someone known comes to your shop and puts the trust in you, that's huge. These artists could go anywhere, it's not like they're working with budgets — any designer, anyone out there. It's a big honour."
May was the middle of wedding season for the clothier.
"It's a lot of earth tones on the suit side — browns and greens," Bassi said when asked about current styles. "Most of clients are Indian guys, right, and not long ago they just didn't like brown suits. 'It's something my grandpa would wear,' you know. That's changed. We do a lot of dinner jackets, kinda funky prints, black trousers."
