Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes
—Henry Thoreau
WOULD you buy a sari blouse for Rs 30,000? A chikan, okay with some silver thrown in, salwar kameez for Rs 75,000? A lehnga choli for Rs 600,000? A sherwani for Rs 25,000? A cotton shirt for Rs 3,000: part of the product line of the same designer that offers you the above opulent objetsd’tart?
You wouldn’t? Well, here comes the surprise. A lot of people do. Manipulated into their vapid vainglorious purchase by a media hype machine that allocates Rs 200 crore worth of free TV time, newspaper/fashtrash magazine space to the 20-odd, mostly self-styled, seldombonafide, ‘fashion designers’ of India. No wild conjecture this, but the findings of a study conducted last year by the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), Delhi, on the free manna dispensed by the media on Indian fashion mavericks in the last decade. "It’s illogical," exclaims Dr Darlie O. Koshy, chairperson, apparel merchandising department, NIFT, "to expend that kind of media resource on an industry, the turnover of which does not exceed 40 crores in 10 years, but spend nothing to advertise a 30,000 crore export and branded garments industry. Imbalanced!" Koshy questions the basis of the media hype. "Dressing 200 socialites and filmstars each isn’t fashion. Where are the volumes, the style statements that become universal, are embraced at various levels of social strata, which qualify to be called ‘fashion’? This talk of Indian fashion is plain hype."
Cleverly, deliberately orchestrated hype. In the creation of which the media and designers have colluded. For mutual benefit. A trend that has its genesis in the ’80s publishing boom when periodicals resorted to plastering glossy images of designers, semi-clad models across their pages in a bid to grab fickle, wavering consumer attention. Real and wannabe designers shrewdly plugged into that need and have continued to bandwagoneer their way into prominence. "We don’t need to advertise," quips Delhi designer Suneet Varma. "The media does it forus" Columns like Who’s Wearing What, I Hate I Like, What’s In What’s Out, Designer of the Week, Outfit of theWeek, TV programmes like Varma’s Style Gurus, help spread the designer gospel from Delhi to Dimapur, Guwahati to Gorakhpur. The media’s transparent fashion illiteracy guarantees instant, unquestioning cult status plus commercial nirvana to virtual nonentities.
An Outlook survey revealed that 38 per cent respondents think Ritu Beri, arguably media’s most successful creation, is an excellent designer. Similar examples abound: take Jatin Kochar, 19 for six years, ‘design’ flotsam, whom a national newspaper lifestyle supplement, Saturday Times, virtually nurtured into spurious celebrity in the last six years. Now chatting indulgently of his trip to Rio, another time of his latest purchase in shoes, underwear, his drag at a party, his nose job.... "It was enough to make one throw up," exclaims hip Delhi-based dentist Aparna Varma. "I went to his Vasant Kunj and Greater Kailash shops. Both closed down in rapid succession. At both one saw clothes that made one weep. Lousy, lifted-off-Bangkok-racks variety. Yet, you constantly read of him as being a design whiz, are subjected to seeing his mug, reading his airhead quotes in your morning paper. Made you angry.Ask WHY?" Ask Vinita Dawra Nangia, (sobriquet in the fashion circuit: Vinita Vreeland from VAGUE after the famous Diane Vreeland from VOGUE!) editor, Saturday Times, why that onslaught happened and the response is a defensive, dissimulating: "But we projected him as a party creature, never as designer." Facts speak otherwise. Ask Nangia about her fashion credentials to edit a national fashion supplement and she responds by describing herself with almost Victorian delicacy as "someone who knows as much about fashion as any other lady with good taste and no training" Ahem! "Good taste," snorts a fashion designer. "Wouldn’t accuse someone who’s just discovered georgette is a fluid fabric of THAT sin." She now writes up Vijay Arora (see ModelBad Cases) as a good ‘designer’ with the same trademark nonchalance.
IT stems from people not understanding the difference between someone who makes clothes and a designer," says Delhi-based designer Rohit ‘Gudda’ Bal. "The latter makes a style statement, packs panache," he says. And the hype around the self-styled gurus? Press releases are often reprinted verbatim by cub reporters-/editors, more interested in the ‘meat’ (Madhu Sapre’s legs!) rather than the bones (the designer’s design credentials) of the story. "Good taste apart, they don’t know Kanjeevaram from Paithani, mauve from lilac," says Varma witheringly of fashion journalists. "I do. Because I’m trained to do what I’m doing. Are they?" Delhi-based designer Rana Dhaka laughs about the time her press release was reproduced with exactitude in a national paper. "Convenient," she laughs, "proclaim oneself a design goddess and it will be printed. Good!" The story would be funny if it weren’t true.
Bal bemoans the fact that matey rather than meritorious considerations decide the print space given to a designer. "It works at the level of having one or two friends in the media. Take them out for lunch, suck up. Bingo: you have a write-up and a new life. As designer! The upcountry customer reads about the nobody being praised to high heavens, thinks he’s great. It’s misleading." In a country where, even 10 years into the establishment of NIFT, no qualified fashion journalists exist, such a scenario is more norm than exception. "It’s a case of blind men leading the blind," quips Narendra Ahmed, NIFT alumnus, Bombay-based fashion editor for Elle and probably the only professionally qualified fashion journalist in the country today. "The girl that writes about floods today writes about fashion tomorrow. No knowledge. No integrity. Who cares? It’s hip, it’s fashionable to write on fashion. So...." Add paid journalism—Delhi-based freelance journalist Anshu Khanna allegedly charges designers Rs 15,000 for every press conference she organises; next plugs the same clients in her fashion column in Asian Age; yet another freelancer reportedly asked Delhi-based Gyaan fashion store owner for Rs 40,000 for 10 ‘insertions’ in national publications over two months—to the list of what is flawed in the media and the recipe for public deception is complete. The fallout of such motivated fashion panegyric? The end consumer gets coopted into the designer hysteria, conned into buying the Rs 30,000 blouse Varma derisively calls the "zardozi tea cozy".
So much for the media. Yet, designers are not innocent bystanders in a hype scenario that has benefited both parties. The media storm is the smokescreen that masks their lack of achievement in real design terms. "The Mughlai costumery Indian designers are hawking as ‘design’ is the couture equivalent of butter chicken," says Delhi-based designer Geetu Kashyap. "Embroidery is not fashion. Zardozi from hereto-hell doesn’t constitute good design. When you crystal and bead everything where’s the design? To make something ornate iseasy. To make simple look stunning is the challenge they can’t meet," says fresh from FIT, New York, and stint as Ralph Lauren apprentice, Rana Dhaka, cuttingly. "Is ANYONE here seriously thrashing fashion? Besides his wife and Nina Pillai, who’ll wear Tarun Tahiliani’s Rs 80,000 drapes?" She turns confessional: "Why anyone else? I wouldn’t wear 60 per cent of the stuff I churn out. It’s about bottomlines here. About keeping 200 workers in work. Not fashion. Don’t see any Guccis or Pradas happening here." Ahmed agrees: "Sixty per cent of chaps here don’t know how to cut. How do you expect them to design?"
Delhi designer RajeshPratap Singh elaborates: "When, like the Ritu Beris of the world, you start designing trash for the Dolly Aunties, you kill good design. There’s no concept of garment engineering. Look beneath the ari and zardozi and you’ll find seams ripping. Not design. It’s plain surface adornment." Bombay-based designer Shahab Durazi, the rarity who’s pernickety about sizing—his garments come in six standardised American sizes—is appalled that not one designer he knows is into cutting and sizing garments. "I supervise every etoile which forms the basis of any new design,"reveals Durazi. "With even top designers here though it’s about telling the master cutter‘idhar puff sleeve karo, udhar kali dena’. One size fits all. How does a client that walks into a store know what will fit her? Fitting is about a tuck here, a nip there. And THIS is sold as couture. At couture prices! The client is being bluffed."
Quality basics apart, many designers including Durazi lament the fact that nothing new has happened in Indian design for the last eight years. "I’ve never walked away with the satisfaction of having seen anything new at any fashion show since ’89," says Durazi. Kashyap (who delivered a surprise with a pathbreaking line statedly inspired by Belgian designer Dries Van Notten last year) agrees. "Designers discovered a safe ‘selling’ look: kalis, choori sleeves, embroidery, miles of yardage, traditional men’s sherwanis, angarkhas translated into women’s wear in the last decade and stayed with that. The one question I asked at every show last year was where are the new looks? Where are the short-fitted kameezes over salwars that would mark a departure from the usual? Who is MOVING? J.J. Vallaya didn’t bother to change his colors, not even the placement of his embroideries, last season. He hasn’t changed that crepe de chine in beige and blue look since the Shalimar Paints show in 1992! Journalists call to ask me what the ‘look for the season’ will be. I can only say ‘same as last year and the year before that’. Silhouettes don’t change, cuts don’t change, colours don’t change. It’s upsetting," she says despairingly.
The consequence, as Delhi designer Ravi Bajaj points out: "They ALL look alike. In Indian wear I can’t make out one designer’s work from another." Asha Baxi, department head, fashion design,at NIFT sums up the disillusionment. "There’s no Indian designer today one can look up to for inspiration, innovation, perfection." Like Hindi masala film producers, Indian designers discovered a winning formula: zardozi armour suits coordinated with slimline-/Patiala/palazzo pants, a decade ago and have continued to repeat themselves. Safely, profitably, uncritically.
Yet, Indian designers need to mask the poverty of design ingenuity. This they do. Successfully. At times with tall claims, other times plain lies. "Bias cut was last year’s catchphrase," fumes a young Delhi designer. "Every press release was full of it. How many guys can cut in bias in India? It took me three months to get even one right. After you cut you hang the garment for 48 hours so the cut ‘sets in’ else the hemline gets squidgy. They took those pains? Well...."
Tall claims constitute bald deception. Fashion shows constitute sweet deception. Ranging from the Rs 2.5 lakh ‘small’ shows to the Rs 20 lakh hoopla that Omega funded for Bal at Delhi. That costing excludes the whisky, champagne, 500 people sit-down dinner—de rigueur sequel to the Cecil De Mille-esque fashion extravaganza prequel. Interestingvariations: the McDowell and Cidade de Goa-sponsored ’94 Ensemble show at Goa to which celebrities like Shobha De, Maureen Wadia, Devika Bhojwani, Alisha Chinai, Parmeshwar Godrej were flown in two days before the event. Sponsored wining, dining, frolic preceded the frocks! Another variation: the recent Richard Gere fashion tamasha in Delhi—reductive rather than helpful for the HIV cause it was purportedly supporting.
Not charity. Cynical, hardboiled, commerce is what such fashion frock ’n rolls are all about, as Bal reveals in a moment of rare candour: "Unlike the West, here the husbands have the money. And till is less fashion, more me-too social event. This is where people whom Rana Dhaka terms "hi-society types, terribly hit by glamour" converge to gawp and be gawped at, where EVERYBODY isloath to own up to being over 34, where the Priyas of the era spell themselves as Preah, where the Vadehras of the world reinvent themselves as Vadra, where clothes are bought not necessarily because they are the best going but "because everyone whose next party you will wear them to is there and knows how much they cost," points out Rana Dhaka.
Not fashion illiterates alone. Even savvy, fashpack varieties you think would know better subscribe to that philosophy. "I’d rather buy a Muzzaffar Ali than an Abraham andThakore. An Ali looks expensive. If one spends Rs 6,000, one likes that to show," drawls fashion choreographer Harmeet Bajaj. That it SHOWS, that they KNOW, is critical. Designers who’ve cannily intuited this, catered to the social and sartorial insecurities of the people who subscribe to this idea are laughing all the way to the bank.
Those designer balance-sheets are nothing to laugh about though (see Designer Turnovers). In a fashion pandemic situation, young bucks like Singh who started two years ago, reportedly clock incomes of Rs 10,000 a day; three-year-old labels like that of Jodhpur-basedRaghuvendra Singh Rathore allegedly net Rs 15,000 a day. Delhi-based Ritu Kumar happily assures you her domestic line is worth "much, much, more" than your Rs 7 crore annual guesstimate even as Tarun Tahiliani owns up to a turnover of Rs 5 crore for Ensemble. Not biggies alone. Even Delhi-based small-timers Leena Aushima who started three years ago with 1.5 lakhs today have a turnover of Rs 1.5 crore. Figures are murky in an industry where most transactions are done in cash and under the table. Yet, industry feedback indicates that members of the 20-odd name designer trade earn between Rs 1 to 5 crore per annum. (Lucrative fallout of cult status: offers to design uniforms for Hyatt like Bajaj has done; for Oberois India wide as Tahiliani has done; for Air India as Varma has done; for the Olympic contingent as Beri did.This, apart from roles in tele-ad campaigns: Beri for shampoo, Ashish Soni for Digjam suit-ings.) Not bad for what remains quintessentially a cottage industry. Albeit one peopled by master tailors like Tarun Tahiliani’s who moves around with a cellphone!
CLEARLYthe fashion show benefits the designer. But what does the sponsor get? Sponsors like five-star watering holes that offer venue space, rooms to models, find their interests converge. They aim to cultivate the very, well-heeled-corporate-celebrity-cash-cow audience the designer hopes to milk. The upmarket cellphone, tyres, fizz drink, sunshades, lipstick, jewellery, watchmaking firms too aim to make a direct hit at the same audience. And what better way to capture audience interest than by holding them captive in five-star comfort for 45 minutes watching the inevitable audiovisual on your company, its product line, its USP; subliminally ingesting your brainwashing balderdash together with someone else’s advertorial (Grover’s Vineyards Presents...!) white wine as they wait for the Breasts ’n Butts fashion spectacular to unfold. To be able to hold an audience captive for THAT long, watching your logo, hearing your spiel, is a marketing coup in a media context where TV TRP-walas report average viewer attention span to be no higher than three to five minutes! In which context,Omega splurging Rs 20 lakh to help Rohit Bal sell a collection that didn’t cost him over Rs 5 lakh to make last year, makes great commercial sense. If they get even a five watch sale out of the entire exercise, they would have recovered costs. Not to mention the bonus of free media mileage worth four times that much. Moral: not designer alone. Even his sponsor, co-hypester is hoping to take you for a ride on the Great Hype Wagon.
So that’s the story of Indian design. Fashion shows and yet more fashion shows. No less than 38 major ones choreographed by two Delhi-based choreographers alone last year. Bangalore-based choreographer Prasad Bidappa did 18 shows last year. At an average costing of Rs 4 lakh pershow, it translates into a Rs 90 lakh income (calculated at minimum 40 per cent profit) between just three people in the business.
There are at least a dozen of them keeping frantic schedules! Not to mention makeup artists like Delhi-based Ambika Pillai who’s done a staggering 28 shows in India and abroad last year. Multiply that by the Rs 1,500 she charges for each of the 12 faces that usually participate in a show and it translates into Rs 5 lakh plus an year! There are six of her ilk in Delhi, at least a dozen cellphone-wielding maquillage monsieurs etmadamoiselles in Bombay. Yes, all very, very, busy.
BUT then, fashion does have the ugly face that needs tarting up. That ugliness is about rip-offs, from Western ramps, from each other. Thus Rina (not Rana) Dhaka is ‘Donna’ Dhaka: she faithfully ripped off Donna Karan year after year till scribe Seema Goswami sounded the alarm in Sunday some years ago. (Things have looked up since. Last year she did do the original short-fitted kurtas Kashyap bemoaned no one had thought about doing.)
Suneet Varma who also came up for (dis)honourable mention for lifting Pucci prints is none the wiser for the experience of that humiliating ‘expose’. Since then, this Indian ‘Style Guru’ has cloned and passed off as his own creation the Yves Saint Laurent bustier. Even that imitation was secondhand: R.P. Singh, then a NIFT undergrad, had done something similar based on the Bikaner thewa for his 1991 Air France design competition.Varma ripped off both Singh and Saint Laurent. Stimulus from one, style from the other. Again, at his show last year, the much-admired Hemi Bawa-devised feather accessories were lifts from a Pacco Rabbane show. Two prominent Delhi designers quietly passed off Thiery Muigler’s ’92 collection spikey and broken glass bustiers as their own in not so recent shows. In literature or art such plagiarism would spell the end of a career. Here neither designer told on each other. Design’s Omerta Code: You don’t squeal on me. I don’t squeal on you!
When they’re not ripping off foreign designers, they’re ripping off each other. "That Gudda," fumes Bombay designer Abu Jani, more outspoken half of the Abu-Sandeep Khosla duo, "has the cheek to come up to me, fuss over me at the same Delhi show where he ripped off OUR Kamasutra look. Look at the Meera Nair film credits. It features our names. It’s on record." Anyone who has seen the cholis in the film would find it difficult to disagree.
That rip-off screams to be noticed. Other rip-offs are more subtle. Last year a leading Delhi designer allegedly picked up sweaters from an exporter, switched labels (and upgraded prices) before selling them as his own. Ditto, Leena Aushima: in a bid to show THEIR versatility they palmed off NIFT designer Josie Khanna’s knitwear (that they’d bought from her) as THEIR Goan Design Collection!
Sometimes poetic justice prevails.
