Now Showing | Mumbai Fashion Week
by SAMEER REDDY
In America, critics regularly lament the Faustian bargain magazines and designers have entered into with Hollywood, whereby celebrities are used to boost both image and sales in exchange for free clothes and steep fees. But in India, where Bollywood is the most significant cultural force, fashion has to kowtow to celebrity on a regular basis in order to exist at all.
At Lakme fashion week, which just wrapped up in Mumbai, the scene was a bit less sensationalistic than in seasons past, but that’s not to say it wasn’t action-packed — this is India, after all, where controlled chaos is the norm. Boldface names descended on the Grand Hyatt in droves, including the tennis superstar Sania Mirza, the “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto and the man candy-cum-Bollywood actors Dino Morea, Rahul Bose and Arjun Rampal. Indian designers are especially enamored of a phenomenon called the “showstopper,” typically a B- or C-list star who trots out at the end of the show, ensuring some coverage the next day on Page Three (India’s equivalent of Page Six).
This season, the sibling designers Shantanu and Nikhil scored the A-list actress Deepika Padukone, difficult to recognize having put on a few extra pounds, who closed their Adidas-sponsored sportswear show. The city’s socialite contingent was well represented by the aptly named ex-beauty queen Queenie Dhody, a scandalous subject of relentless tabloid coverage who presented her jewelry line. Other prominent ladies sitting in the front row included a Wunderkind-sporting Haseena Jethmalani and Sabina Chopra, the wife of the Lakme adviser Anil Chopra, who sported a gravity-defying bird’s-nest-meets-Bride of Frankenstein hairdo on the closing day.
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At Lakme fashion week, which just wrapped up in Mumbai, the scene was a bit less sensationalistic than in seasons past, but that’s not to say it wasn’t action-packed — this is India, after all, where controlled chaos is the norm. Boldface names descended on the Grand Hyatt in droves, including the tennis superstar Sania Mirza, the “Slumdog Millionaire” star Freida Pinto and the man candy-cum-Bollywood actors Dino Morea, Rahul Bose and Arjun Rampal. Indian designers are especially enamored of a phenomenon called the “showstopper,” typically a B- or C-list star who trots out at the end of the show, ensuring some coverage the next day on Page Three (India’s equivalent of Page Six).
This season, the sibling designers Shantanu and Nikhil scored the A-list actress Deepika Padukone, difficult to recognize having put on a few extra pounds, who closed their Adidas-sponsored sportswear show. The city’s socialite contingent was well represented by the aptly named ex-beauty queen Queenie Dhody, a scandalous subject of relentless tabloid coverage who presented her jewelry line. Other prominent ladies sitting in the front row included a Wunderkind-sporting Haseena Jethmalani and Sabina Chopra, the wife of the Lakme adviser Anil Chopra, who sported a gravity-defying bird’s-nest-meets-Bride of Frankenstein hairdo on the closing day.
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One of the week’s unexpected highlights came courtesy of Christopher Kane, who partnered with the hairstyling brand TIGI to present two of his previous collections. The beadwork on Kane’s spring/summer 2010 pieces looked right at home on the Indian runway, and judging from the post-show buzz, he might have found a few new customers.
Much of the homegrown talent was also enthusiastically received. Sabyasachi, who has shown at New York fashion week for several seasons in the past, was in top form, offering an elegant vision of ethnic pastiche that was right up there with Dries Van Noten. Malini Ramani’s colorful, embroidered jet-setter wear would undoubtedly please Matthew Williamson fans. And Little Shilpa’s Perspex helmets are sure to turn the heads of shoppers in search of Indian avant-garde.
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In the end, however, the most compelling thing to emerge from the week was not the clothing but the re-evaluation of the role that fashion weeks play in this age of oversaturation. As T’s Stefano Tonchi noted last week, keeping up with New York, London, Milan and Paris is an exhaustive task. Once you factor in the men’s, couture, resort and pre-fall shows, not to mention the far-flung fashion weeks constantly cropping up all over the world, merely keeping track of the schedule amounts to a Sisyphean task. And given how crowded the global marketplace already is, what chance do Indian designers have of breaking into the bigger international ranks, where the competition is even fiercer and the crowds less forgiving?
Colin McDowell, who passed over Paris this season to check out Mumbai, was sanguine about Indian fashion’s prospects, observing that “it’s a rite of passage for a country of India’s importance to have a fashion week … and there is a future for fashion here, but it’s going to be a long haul. One thing that will help them enormously is that very soon journalists won’t have to travel the world to see collections. The I.T. revolution enfranchises everyone.”
No doubt the day will come when Manish Arora isn’t the only Indian talent known around the world. But until then, designers might do better to focus their energy at home, where at the very least the economy is growing.
Colin McDowell, who passed over Paris this season to check out Mumbai, was sanguine about Indian fashion’s prospects, observing that “it’s a rite of passage for a country of India’s importance to have a fashion week … and there is a future for fashion here, but it’s going to be a long haul. One thing that will help them enormously is that very soon journalists won’t have to travel the world to see collections. The I.T. revolution enfranchises everyone.”
No doubt the day will come when Manish Arora isn’t the only Indian talent known around the world. But until then, designers might do better to focus their energy at home, where at the very least the economy is growing.
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