Quite coincidentally, two books of fashion, by Shefalee Vasudev and Wendell Rodricks, entered my world during the fashion week in Mumbai. Shefalee is a fellow editor, having been at the helm of Marie Claire before she set out to give the book her complete attention, and Wendell is a designer who has walked with me since the time I took over as editor of Femina in 1993.
Shefalee’s Room is a bit of a maze. Intricate passages link corridors where distorted mirrors hang, reflecting her view of fashion as a series of disjointed subjective images. As I wandered deeper in, stumbling over some of the furniture she had placed, I realised that the real content was centered around a social exploration of attitudes to clothes, trends and fashion. Thus the images of fashion offered to the reader come through the author’s interactions with designers, a sales girl, a few fashion victims from Ludhiana and Delhi, some models....
So we come to know that designer Rakesh Agarwal was repeatedly sexually abused as a child, a fact that he divulges to her as part of his family background, looking her “straight in the eye”. She also shares other secrets: the very talented Imcha Imchen suffered from bipolar disorder and contemplated suicide; Rohit Gudda Bal doesn’t do drugs (“The raja doesn’t need the powder room”), and in a misplaced use of the term, that Sabyasachi has a “Cinderella Complex”. All of which, however is really not relevant to the subject of the book. Then there are the ordinary people: Nagma (name changed), a model who walks the gritty road of hope only to spend nights modelling in a two-piece bikini for her ‘Boss’; Ludhiana-based Radhika Gupta, mother of two, who gets 50k as pocket money, “wears figure-hugging Roberto Cavalli jeans with a Cavalli belt, Gucci T-shirt and Coach shoes.”
Sadly, there is not a whisper from any of them on how the industry runs, numbers, turnovers, the unseen stakeholders of fashion—the craftsmen: nothing a student of fashion can use as reference. Reading more like the report of a long cocktail weekend spent with “people who matter” than a real unravelling of the fashion scene in India, the tapestry of Shefalee’s text is full of knots. Inaccuracies like Jean-Christophe Babin being called Jean-Christophe C. Baba, Keo Karpin spelt Keo Carpin, Mazhar Khan, and not Sanjay, named as the husband who hit Zeenat Aman in public, are just a few. Any book on fashion needs an element of style. Shefalee does not even try! Writing as a star-struck novice let loose in the fashion world, her journalistic skills alone come to her rescue in a few chapters.
Wendell’s Room is, on the other hand, full of light. His writing is like his design creations: structured, yet free-flowing. His images are loaded with emotion and bring alive segments of his life: whether it’s the crowded, chawl-like Terrace Building of his early youth, or the first fashion show he watches in the chandelier-lit Intercontinental Hotel in Paris; the steam-filled kitchens of the Catering College, Mumbai; the Royal Oman Police Officers’ Club or the scene backstage during one of his many fashion events. The early chapters leading to his childhood are the best, evocative and almost novel-like in their capacity to enthrall.
Biographies can tend to become self-indulgent and obsessive. Wendell walks on thin ice when he devotes large segments to his many collections, but with some deft interspersing of events and stories keeps the interest level going. Incidents sad, funny, startling and little-known combine to make the tale a long but fascinating one. The genesis of Lakme Fashion Week on the stone steps of the Central Library in New York; the recaptioning of vintage India-created royal costumes in a Portuguese Museum catalogue; the “boycott” of the Christmas lunch by his family when news of his formal Pacte Civil de Solidarite with his partner Jerome Marrel became public, are tales that alternately entertain or touch the heart. As you walk through the Green Room with the writer, you realise that in its own way, the book is a chronicle of a country in transition from home-grown to a fashion-conscious urbane society. That it is eminently readable is then all the more significant.
(Sathya Saran is a former editor of Femina. A version of this piece appears in print
