The last word in luxury

Suzy Menkes is an unabashed Indophile and, not surprisingly, feels India is a natural home for luxury, finds Anoothi Vishal

When I meet her, at the International Herald Tribune’s conference on sustainable luxury in New Delhi, the legendary Suzy Menkes has just finished talking (to someone else) about Bollywood. No fashion, no finance — Bollywood, of all things! “I am interested in everything,” she tells me with a smile when I question her about her choice of subject, and then adds, “we can talk about anything,” thus setting the agenda for our meeting.

Menkes’s easy demeanour, in fact, quite belies the larger-than-life persona that she has always cultivated, the famous pompadour and all. As the IHT’s long-standing fashion editor, Menkes is, of course, the opinion-maker when it comes to the world of fashion and luxury. She can tear a reputation to pieces just as easily as she can make a career with a kind word or two. But ask her about her columns and she smiles once again, setting the record straight: “It’s not as if I set out to tear someone apart. When I am critical, it is because I am so disappointed… In fashion, the most common phrase is ‘Oh! Darling you were wonderful,’ but what is that really worth?”

 

India, on the other hand, is a country that has never quite disappointed Menkes. Her love affair with it began 30 years ago when she toured “poetic Jaisalmer” with her husband. And she kept coming back, “doing the whole Rajasthan thing”, but also travelling everywhere from Kerala (“I always tell people who have never visited India to begin from here”) to Rishikesh and upwards into the Himalayas (“because I love being high up”). She tells me that she has even contemplated buying a house in Pondicherry; and Delhi, despite its “growing traffic and pollution”, is still charming with its Khan Market.

On this trip, Menkes says, she has shopped in that market and others, so much as to “single-handedly improve your economy”. She has bought expensive and exclusive shawls from Kashmir Weave, a company manufacturing and exporting products made at their state-of-the-art design facility in the state “that I don’t know how many Indians even get to see”, and yards and yards of fabric for a friend who makes her own clothes, not to mention many other trinkets too. “I like,” she pauses, just as I am about to leave, “your bangle.” But that comes much later.

This love affair with India — “We as Britishers have always been fascinated with the Raj, that is an important period in our history” — extends to other sensibilities as well. Readers of her columns will no doubt know that Menkes has always championed the cause of Indian craftsmanship and rooted for designers showcasing at least a bit of the ethnic. “It would be sad if Indian designers took out India from their designs,” she says categorically, mentioning the works of Manish Arora (“India in all its colour and splendour, the Rajasthani and Mughal influences”), Ashish N Soni (“Completely at the other end of the spectrum, so understated”) and Sabyasachi Mukherjee (“No one else captures the vibrancy of India better”) as the three Indian fashion designers whose work she really appreciates even though she does not like to name names as that can be “so unfair to those who are not named”.

“A happy marriage,” she proclaims, of the big luxury houses trying to find their toeholds in India, will be “something like the one Hermès has with craftsmen in India”. (The luxury brand sources many of its products from the country.)

India has an unbroken affair with luxury, Menkes points out — unlike China, which “forgot its earlier tradition of luxury” and has become a destination for cheap sourcing. But what she means is not just the Cartier-owning (former) royalty. “I see your weddings as luxury too”, she says, “from the kind of food laid out to the clothes and jewels, the venue...”

What offends her is the idea of cheaper and ever-cheaper clothes: that is something that can’t go on forever. “I find it incongruous that you should be paying the same for a dress in New York as you would for a cup of coffee elsewhere.” As a middle-class Indian, I point out, what I find even more incongruous is the fact that a dress can cost more than a month’s salary for some people in the country, and certainly much more for those we label as “living below the poverty line”. Travelling in India, partaking of its spirit and colour but also of its poverty, and then writing about magnificent lines of fashion and luxury, does she never feel a sense of disconnect? That people want to celebrate the poverty of the slums after Slumdog Millionaire is a shame, she lets me know, “It disgusts me.” On the other hand, what is luxury?” she goes on to question in a bit of a philosophic vein. “It is not logos or showing off.”

As a young woman, Menkes says she could never imagine going out and buying something as expensive as she sees “very young girls” in their 20s buy today, girls who are sometimes not even earning. Buying luxury on credit cards, she adds, is something she will never approve of. Menkes is also happy that the whole era of gilded crocodile-leather bling is now over. In the last two years, things had become too much, she says. Luxury may not be only about excess. It is aspiring to have something that you cannot have, she says, still philosophical. It could be “A mother who is not so well-off wanting to buy something for her daughter, a dress, because she will look nice in it. That’s when you begin to understand luxury.” Touché.