Style without substance

There are three fashion entities in existence that claim to be helping nurture young designers.

The custodians of the Lakme Fashion Week were the first off the mark by claiming high moral ground by saying that their senior designers did not feel threatened by younger designers and therefore they spent lots of time mentoring them.

The Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) then decided that they too had what it takes when it comes to encouraging talent. So those designers headed to the Tranoi Fair in Paris this year were promised monetary help by the council. The breakaway faction, the Fashion Foundation of India, not to be outdone, too announced monetary help to their designers participating in Tranoi.

Then, the recently-concluded HDIL Couture Week in Mumbai organised by FDCI had designers getting a generous cash handout for just participating in the week.

Is this then the best time to be a fashion designer, if there is so much cash to be got for just participating in what are essentially business generating forums? I would say this is probably a negative time for the industry because talent doesn’t dry up due to lack of money but lack of infrastructure support and direction.

What Indian fashion needs right now is not more money being infused into the balance sheets of individual designers but in building infrastructure that will sustain and build the industry in a way that hasn’t happened yet.

Take, for instance, something as basic as sizing. No Indian designer has the money to pay for a comprehensive study on Indian sizes and hence even the most expensive and creatively brilliant fashion designer has not been able to address this with their clothes.

So, you could well buy a particular garment from a particular designer in a small size but then find that another garment from the same designer now only fits you in a medium size.

Even companies like Top Shop, which many who ply the high fashion trade deride for selling cheap fashion, has a detailed study on sizing. So its medium is always medium and its small always small. On the creative side, not to have the sizing issue resolved is a bit like trying to pin a tail on an elephant blindfolded because sizing does determine a lot in how a garment will look and fit in the end.

And yet, none of the money-throwing bodies have even thought of commissioning such a study. If sizing is still a blind spot after almost 20 years of fashion, there are other issues of a serious nature that are as ignored by everyone, including all these multiplying fashion factions.

And the reason for this is that there are only narrow personal interests at work and no one with vision is at the forefront in an industry that should have, by now, been at least a Rs 2,000 crore (normally in some other sectors this would be the size of just one company) industry.

As the fashion world prepares for a multitude of fashion weeks this month, maybe all this will be lost on the industry as it giddily laps up all the media attention, for Indian fashion is all about style without substance.

(archana.jahagirdar@bsmail.in)