The new India An unlikely figure posed on the cover of Vogue India last November: Victoria Beckham. She was not dressed in one of her predictable torso-squelching shift dresses. Instead, she wore a traditional peach bikini top and long sari scarf, with a mang tikka, or bejewelled pendant, weaving through her softly tousled hair to hang from her forehead like a genetically engineered bindi.
The cover beamed with national pride, announcing Mrs Beckham as Vogue’s “Indian Bride”. The story made headlines worldwide and the edition was snapped up in more than 100 Indian cities, not to mention abroad. By procuring the sergeant-major of the western fashion army as their cover star, Vogue India – and by extension Indian fashion – had won global approval.
“It being a Vogue, it will find its way to other parts of the world and draw attention to Indian designers, Indian photographers and even Indian models,” said Alex Kuruvilla, the managing director of Vogue India’s parent company, Condé Nast India, at the magazine’s launch in September 2007. He may not have quite got it right about the model, but he was certainly right about the impact.
Yet even before Mrs Beckham’s much-publicised seal of approval, India’s homegrown designers had already paved a way towards international recognition. Two designers in particular had struck out, elbows sharply poised, to edge their way on to the European and US catwalks. By choosing to place their designs alongside the powerful western couture houses, both Manish Arora, who showed his collection first at London Fashion Week in 2005, and thenceforth in Paris, and Sabyasachi Mukherjee, who has shown in New York for the past two years, asserted India’s strengthening voice among the fashion elite.
Neither designer, tellingly, ignored his Indian roots, producing clothes infused with idiosyncratic and traditional leitmotifs. “Manish Arora is easily our most famous design export,” says Pearl Shah, deputy fashion editor of Marie Claire India. “Manish takes kitsch symbols like Hindu gods and goddesses, adds lots of bling, and has now found himself a T-shirt deal with Swarovski Crystallized and other collaborations with Swatch and M.A.C Cosmetics. Sabyasachi, on the other hand, works with dark hues, natural prints and antique embroideries but teams them with western silhouettes such as tailored jackets, shifts, or smocks. Browns boutique in London is a regular buying house seen at his shows.”
“My designs are contemporary, with many influences, and there is a distinct Indian origin to them,” confirms Mr Arora. “My label is stocked in over 75 stores across the world and our biggest markets are Europe, the Middle East and Japan. The response from showing in Paris has been fantastic and it has helped enormously as far as exposure and sales are concerned. I hope to change the way Indian fashion is perceived and think I have achieved a little bit of that already. I think India and Indian designers are just starting to stake their claim in global fashion – there is still a long way to go.”
Other Indian success stories include Abu Jani, who, with the help of Sarah Brown, wife of the UK prime minister, was thrown into the spotlight last year. Mrs Brown wore a number of outfits by the brand’s Indian designers, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, when she accompanied her husband on a trip to the subcontinent last January. Each of her looks was analysed in the press with more scrutiny than a counterintelligence document, garnering the design duo national and international recognition.
Not that they necessarily needed it. The Mumbai-based designers, who have a shop in fashionable west London, dressed Dame Judi Dench for the Oscars in 1999, while in the summer of 2007 they were named in BusinessWeek’s list of the 50 most powerful Indians. Western notoriety had already helped sealed their international success.
Like many of India’s emerging designers, Manish Arora, Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Abu Jani have triumphed because of their fusion of traditional fabrics and embroidery with western silhouettes. Although Mrs Brown wore a traditional salwar kameez, or long tunic, on her state visit to India, when twinned with loose silk trousers and a pale purple pashmina, it was a look that would have suited Number 10 as much as the streets of Delhi.
Indeed, if you peruse the websites of India’s other leading designers – Rajesh Pratap Singh, Abraham & Thakore and Rohit Bal – it won’t be Bollywood glitz that shimmies across the screen. The spring/summer collection from Abraham & Thakore, for instance, kicks off with an indigo jumpsuit: it couldn’t get more fashion forward than that. There are also flirty capri pants, crisp linen shirts tied under the bust and sunny summer dresses with monochrome floral prints. Think Audrey Hepburn on a cycling holiday rather than a scene from the musical Bombay Dreams.
“As designers, we have been concerned with trying to speak a contemporary design language that is understood internationally, but yet is strongly rooted in our design ethos,” says David Abraham, one of the founders of Abraham & Thakore. “Not all Indian design is about madly coloured embroidery sparkling with mirrors and sequins. This, however, is the popular perception both in India, and abroad, due to what I term the ‘Bollywoodisation’ of our culture. It’s a bit tragic.”
Abraham & Thakore has managed to perform strongly at home and overseas, particularly in the affluent Middle East market. And it is not alone.
“We are born and brought up in India and so, of course, our work is rooted here, yet our clothes don’t scream India,” says Delhi-based designer Rajesh Pratap Singh. “They definitely have an Indian soul but do not tread the path of kitsch India or Bollywood, which are two symbols most visible to the outside audience.”
Instead, Mr Singh’s style is “simple, constructed, with subtle details”. They are the kind of clothes you would expect to see on the Chloé or Philip Lim catwalks: soft shapes, light textures, zingy colours such as vermilion, raspberry and crimson. A video on the designer’s website shows western models parading on a minimalist white catwalk, underlining Mr Singh’s unspoken message: I can take on the west.
Such tangible confidence from a large number of homegrown designers is arguably a result of India’s economic growth rate. Although it slowed this year as a result of the worldwide recession, in 2007 India experienced its second fastest growth since 1947, expanding at a rate of 9.4 per cent. This surge has enabled a rapid expansion of the Indian fashion industry, not only supporting India’s more established designers but also giving impetus to emerging talent.
Priya Tanna, editor of Vogue India, says the number of Indian designers has grown significantly in the past five years. “I think a key catalyst has been the advent of Indian fashion weeks. Fashion weeks in Delhi and Mumbai have shown a commitment to spotting young designers and providing them with a platform to showcase their talent.”
India’s three fashion fanfares, the Wills India Fashion Week, Delhi Fashion Week and Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, all strive to propel native talent and underscore India’s ability to rival the west. The government also recognises the fashion industry’s potential. Its Fashion Design Promotion Council (FDPC) recently announced plans to build a fashion hub in Maidan Garhi, south Delhi, through which Indian designers will be promoted.
“There are new designers launching collections constantly,” says Mr Abraham of Abraham & Thakore. “Economic growth has had a positive effect. We find the domestic business is growing much faster than exports. There is an increasing awareness of fashion in metropolitan India. We have a new shop in a mall in Delhi with many other Indian designers and other brands such as Dior, Paul Smith and Armani.”
India’s constantly evolving culture has produced a shift in the approach to fashion. Local designers are not simply satisfying an international market with their increasingly western designs, but are also feeding the desires of a more versatile and metropolitan Indian consumer.
“In this country, demand for design is directly proportionate to the rapidly changing roles of modern Indian women,” says Vogue’s Ms Tanna. “Women who are embracing the corporate culture want access to international fashion. They are now active participants in the global village and there is a strong need for western silhouettes in their lives. As a result, Indian designers have become versatile. What is beautiful is that they are keeping their Indian sensibilities in mind.”
As long as India continues to produce and spend, its fashion star will continue to rise. “We are buying, consuming, and as a result international brands want a part of the Indian pie,” says Ms Tanna. “I strongly feel that India and Indian style is having a global moment.”
Nicola Copping is the FT’s deputy fashion editor
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From Gandhi to Gucci
In India, clothes have long been imbued with serious political connotations, writes Amy Kazmin.
Among the most powerful symbols of Indian resistance to British colonial rule was the move in the 1920s by Indian nationalists to stop wearing British and other foreign-made garments in favour of simple garments made from homespun cotton cloth, known as khadi.
Mahatma Gandhi, the visionary leader of India’s independence struggle, spent hours spinning his own cotton cloth, and urging his followers to do the same as part of their struggle for freedom from foreign domination. He also expressed distaste for bright, bold colours, urging women to wear pure white so they could participate in public life without appearing immodest or provocative.
While none but Gandhi’s most fervent followers rebuffed colour and ornamentation as completely as he advocated, the Mahatma’s austere dress sense remained a major influence on what affluent Indians wore for decades after India’s 1947 independence. This fashion of simplicity was reinforced by independent India’s initially socialist-oriented economic policies, which emphasised self-reliance and frowned on obvious displays of wealth.
India’s now flourishing fashion industry was born in this seemingly unpromising terrain in the late 1980s, shortly before an economic meltdown forced New Delhi to open its state-controlled economy to market forces.
Pioneering fashion designers such as Tarun Tahiliani, Rohit Khosla, Asha Sarabhai, Ritu Kumar and JJ Valaya, initially focused almost exclusively on traditional Indian garments that were worn at weddings, where open displays of opulence were still permissible.
Their luxurious creations drew on the subcontinent’s abundant supply of rich, hand-woven textiles, and used traditional forms of labour-intensive embellishment with beads, small mirrors, crystals and embroidery of silver or gold threads.
“Layering on lavish embellishments enabled them to justify the high prices they were seeking in a country of consumers not used to spending lavish amounts,” says Mukti Khaire, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, who has studied the evolution of India’s fashion industry.
The early focus on embellishment – rather than the structural design innovation that often characterises western fashion – was also marketed as a way of reviving and supporting endangered traditional handicraft skills.
“High fashion was pitched not as a new industry but as a positive force for reviving old ones, aiding the poor and preserving national heritage,” Ms Khaire says.
Today, affluent Indians are less hesitant to splash out on expensive clothes. This is allowing Indian designers to create less elaborate, western-style fashions, although they often still retain Indian sensibilities in the colour, cut or intricate designs of the fabric. “People are seeing that you can buy simpler clothes at high prices,” says Ms Khaire.
Amy Kazmin is the FT’s New Delhi correspondent
