The opening of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week received the usual amount of attention this week, but for all the wrong reasons. Everyone from designers and models to buyers and other guests found themselves turfed out of the venue. The Fashion Design Council of India, that has organised the event for years now, had failed to get the requisite no-objection certificate from the fire department. The organiser?s defence was not without merit?the fire department surely didn?t have to wait till the last minute to raise its objections. Scheduling issues have been sorted out, and the fashion week extended by a day to accommodate the late start. Still, it?s tempting to see the scuffle as a metaphor for the muddled state of the Indian fashion industry. Remember, the week also saw fashion weeks take place all the way from Seoul to Ottawa, from Los Angeles to Beijing and Tokyo. None of these arenas reported like fracas. For more than a decade now, we have been tom-toming the great promise of domestic talent. Fashion weeks have mushroomed in the interim. The Lakme Fashion Week that took place earlier this month grabbed a lot of attention and so has the Wills one. Spokespeople radiate confidence, optimism. Is this just a fa?ade? Yes and no.
Business has grown. One study claims that the Indian fashion industry will leapfrog from Rs 180 crore at present to Rs 1,000 crore over the next decade or half. When the global slowdown left big western brands breathing hard, their Indian counterparts remained insouciant on the back of sustained demand from the domestic market as well as alternative ones like the Middle East. But consider how repetitively one Indian designer or the other makes headlines by claiming that he or she is the only one to have truly gone global?this could be by way of a virgin show in London or a retail appearance at a New York boutique?and you realise that this is a business whose numbers are much more opaque than those of other businesses. Some designers?such as Sabyasachi Mukherjee?are straightforward about the fact that 90% of their turnovers come from India. But many try to disguise how matrimonial bling plays just as important a role in today?s repertoire as it did when the likes of JJ Valaya were starting off. The US First Lady Michelle Obama has made us all feel good by wearing a Naeem Khan and a Prabal Gurung (he happens to be an alumnus of NIFT, Delhi). But none of this establishes that Indian designers?as a breed?have become global players or that proliferating Indian fashion weeks have acquired the business mojos that similar events in, say, Tokyo and Beijing boast.
