A FEW weeks back, I found myself in a refreshing conversation with an Indian publisher who, having recently started her own publishing business, has chosen to primarily focus on going digital. We spoke about the huge potential of addressing a larger number of readers than existing publishers are able to through the print format, about the stiff cultural elitism in small pockets of urban India that has informed rules of publishing in English over the last many decades, and the need here for well written, simple, fiction. It made me reflect on whether Indian fashion designers are thinking about the clothing needs of the Indian mass markets for the future, about the existing ecology of Indian fashion that one is situated in, and whether it may be time for us to collectively rethink notions of what qualifies as this very Indian ‘fashion industry’ that one has come to associate with a familiar network of designers, brands, magazines, writers, retailers, friends and peers.

I am reminded of a statistic shared with me by a brand professional a few years back that, in India until then, marketing analysis had shown that a majority of working women had continued to choose what they wear to work outside the structure of organized ready-to-wear. What this means is that until this time, just a little more than five years back, professional Indian women were largely visiting their own tailors, buying fabrics of their choice, customizing details of garments, wearing saris, deciding what their look for a kurta would be, picking their own favourite colours and so on. This stands in stark contrast to almost the entire, rest-of- the world retail environment, especially in the so-called ‘developed’ countries, where ready-to-wear forms the primary source of choice of what to wear, with the exception of a niche segment of made to order services at certain price points.

This resonated with a poetic invocation by writer Arundhati Roy, about the idea of autonomy in clothing, also from some years back. We had been seated next to each other at a performance in which an artist had presented to the audience two street cobblers and auctioned his photographs of them to raise funds to build them a permanent home. She had just returned to the country from a first trip to China, and engaging with my interest in writing about Indian fashion, spoke about how delighted she felt that unlike any other country in the world, we have such easy access to a world of textiles and neighbourhood tailors. I see it as particularly inspiring that she appears on the cover of Elle magazine India, celebrating its 20th issue, given both her own eclectically original style of dressing, as well as the fact that Elle is the oldest edition of an international fashion magazine in the country.

 

It is this very mix that must constitute, in my view, our expanded understanding of what informs a sense of Indian fashion: A vibrant self-organized mode of production which includes independent tailoring units, regional diversity of textiles and clothing traditions that don’t completely erode despite the all-pervading retail chains growing at a fast pace, and the importance of local language media with readership-viewership as equally popular as the English and Hindi media, if not more. This, to a great extent, influences the choices that Indians make about what they wear on an everyday basis. Becoming a source for local merchandising for even the biggest, homogenous brands, its role in defining one of the fastest growing markets in the world cannot, of course, be underestimated.

 

It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when fashion designers in India first started self-consciously calling themselves as such. The National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) had started around this time, initiated by the Government of India in association with the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Its mandate, as evident in the carefully chosen choice of terminology – technology, not design – was to train professionals in garment manufacturing, primarily to cater to the needs of the apparel export sector in India. Internationally, this was a time that economies around the world from the United States to Japan, had seen a phase of exponential growth.

European brands such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci, known till then for expertise in specific product categories such as handmade leather luggage and footwear respectively, had started evolving into multinational luxury brands with a variety of women’s and menswear. The phenomenon of ready-to-wear was being promoted through massive expansion in fashion retail. Japan was the first Asian country to respond to western fashion, not only by becoming a big consumer for western brands like those, but also by presenting its own unique fashion vision in Paris through brands such as Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) and Yohji Yamamoto.

 

In the post-World War II scenario, this Japanese invasion, which was antithetical to the western notion of female hourglass figures by celebrating the anti-fit form of silhouettes, could also be seen as Asia’s bold artistic assertion in a world that was till then governed in the cultural field by the West. Its impact was not only felt in the opening up of plural perspectives on what western fashion could be, but in the establishment of an equality, to some extent, of cultural discourse between two continents that had until then been seen in the bipolarity of the former colonized and the latter colonizing. The rise of such Japanese brands internationally was accompanied equally by their growth within the country, as well as an equally prolific phase of creative production, in the fields of visual arts, architecture and design through what is seen as an unprecedented economic boom period for Japan.

In India during this time, there was a phenomenal rise in apparel export companies that catered to the tailoring requirements of the western fashion industry. Hundreds of manufacturing units and companies emerged during this period, and the Indian government further provided financial incentives to this sector. From India’s historical reputation as a source of some of the finest designed and produced textiles in the world until the 19th century, India’s emergence then as a source of cheap labour for manufacturing is a journey that has not sufficiently been analysed nor written about. Not only does it address the results of a devastating colonial rule, but in the post-independence period, also the failure of business enterprise to develop international fashion and design brands that could communicate notions of contemporary India globally, and on their own terms.

 

It is in this context that one must begin seeing the genesis of the idea of the fashion designer in India. Such individuals – some of whom came from families that had experience in the export industry – were eager to challenge the notion that India was only a manufacturer of garments for the West. Graduating as early batches of fashion students from NIFT, many of them started their own labels, catering to a familiar network of clients in cities such as Mumbai and Delhi. In a post-reforms climate in India, they not only found ready markets with increasing levels of disposable income, but also a nascent print and television media environment that would give them – within a short time span – a star-like status, propelling them into national celebrityhood.

After politicians, film and sport stars, Rohit Bal, Tarun Tahiliani, Ritu Kumar, Rina Dhaka, J.J. Valaya, Suneet Varma, Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla and Manish Malhotra, among others, became household names in a fast changing, urbanizing India aspiring towards upwardly mobile aesthetics. Both tabloids and mainstream magazines gave them more renown than most contemporary authors – in English or any other language – of the time, and visual artists, now big-ticket personalities, tailed far behind them then in their pop fame. While many of them played around with western styles and fusion collections, their ultimate financial success came from addressing the Indian wedding market.

 

Much has been written about the importance of bridal wear for Indian fashion designers. One of the critical manifestations of its continuing significance is that most of these early designers today show at new formats such as Couture Week in Delhi – couture being a borrowed term from the European haute couture context, standing for highly artisanal, one-of-a-kind, handmade garments – rather than the regular, twice-a-year fashion week in Delhi and Mumbai, which supposedly focus on ready-to-wear. Some of them have started designing weddings; in many smaller towns and cities in India they are often the most coveted guests at such weddings, even their brief presence assuring instant local press and heightened status for the families organizing these weddings. Some other renowned Indian fashion designers, who originally built their primary businesses in the West, after years of intellectual snobbery about this very wedding market, have begun to reorient their designs towards occasional Indian wear. Younger designers, and quite definitely the more financially successful ones – with the exception of a few – function within this Indian occasional wear ecology as well.

It was Kolkata-based designer Sabyasachi’s financial success a few years back – widely reported in the mainstream press as having reached upwards of Rs 100 crore in annual revenues – that brought in, it can be said, a little more pride in the ability to scale-up fashion studios, often joked about as mom-and-pop businesses. This also instilled the confidence that this Indian bridal industry needed to be studied for its own specificities: anthropologists and fashion writers alike started taking the Indian fashion industry more seriously than before, even creating new, conceptual theories about its intrinsic politics and motivations. In parallel, a few years back, Anita Dongre, Ritu Kumar and Satya Paul had exploited the potential of scaling up, leading prolific, multiple-brand enterprises which address different segments of the women’s wear market in India, brands that could be capitalized through the strength of their names and popularity.

Internationally, most major brands have found business models to convert highly coveted high-end collections to easily accessible products at various price points, from hand-bags and sunglasses to best-selling perfumes. But, despite the fact that major Indian fashion designers influence the work of multi-brand chains that sell products at relatively lower price points, quite evidently, the distance between the role that the Indian fashion designer occupies in the national imagination, and his or her ability to optimize the opportunities in the burgeoning Indian market of more than a billion people for apparel and fashion is, by any reasonable estimates, far.

 

Around the same time that Indian fashion designers were finding their first opportunities, design for handcrafted textiles was undergoing a fundamental metamorphosis. A series of ambitious cultural diplomacy initiatives, Festivals of India, were started in the early 1980s by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Conceived in the post-Emergency environment, to present the best of contemporary Indian culture to the world, they included numerous exhibitions and collaborative projects between the United States, the then-USSR, France, Germany, China, Japan and many other countries. From textiles, handicrafts, the visual to the performing arts, they captured the imagination of the world. In Paris, the avenue leading up to the Eiffel Tower was transformed for one of the festival’s opening gala events, with Indian musicians and dancers performing on boats on the River Seine. In the former USSR, the Kremlin was opened for the Indian extravaganza. Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 did not diminish the festival’s impact, and was taken forward by her son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi who enthusiastically attended many of its opening ceremonies.

 

Channelling a massive network of creative artists, designers, craftspeople and the Indian bureaucracy, the Festivals of India played an important role in catalyzing young talent in the country through state support. In an atmosphere where private enterprise in craft and design was at a nascent stage, the festivals became a meeting ground for aesthetes and creative producers and in the case of the textile revival projects, cultivated new markets for contemporary handcraft, both within the country and abroad. The scale of the accompanying exhibitions was astounding; venues included the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and Cooper and Hewitt Museum in New York. In Paris, the Museum of Decorative Arts, as part of the Louvre complex and one of the leading museums of design in the world with an almost 120-year-old history, hosted its first ever exhibition singularly dedicated to India, on contemporary Indian handcrafted textiles.

Not only did these expositions boost the image of India abroad, they opened up India’s vast cultural resources – especially its handcraft – to designers from around the world. They led to dynamic collaborations between creative studios in other parts of the world and India, and their impact can be hugely discerned on the formation of contemporary Indian design brands even today. In my view however, one of their chief roles was in the shaping of cultural interlocutors such as Rajeev Sethi, Martand Singh and Dashrath Patel, among the leading curators.

 

At a time when the Indian contemporary scene had not penetrated globally to the level it has today, when the country could not boast of even one Indian international visual artist, and when India based visual arts curators had only begun to articulate their relationship with the world, ideas about India were being articulated by those who worked in the fields of design and textiles, led by handcraft. They were received as equals by the international influencers, they collaborated with some of the best cultural thinkers in the world, and they had the ears of the Indian polity.

In contemporary times, such leadership in the cultural community from the country is difficult to find: Only in the last two years has one seen important institutions in the West dedicate solo exhibitions on the work of Indian contemporary artists: earlier, prominent exhibitions in decorative arts and design museums have largely focused on the colonial history of Indian maharajas and allied exotica and there has not been a comprehensive major one on Indian contemporary design! A handful of curators and artists from the visual arts field find themselves at par – in international opportunities and remunerations – with international curators.

 

In fashion, the only designer recently to be offered an international collaboration, Manish Arora for Paco Rabanne, did not create much impact, and the last such collaboration – relatively more pioneering, long-lasting and successful – between Issey Miyake and Asha Sarabhai, the former presenting a dedicated line called Asha by Miyake Design Studio was way back in 1984. In contrast, economists from India are internationally acclaimed names; Indian multinationals have bought over major global companies and are running them. Here too, an aggressively marketed campaign – Make in India – seems to further consolidate the view that the best that the Indian economy can reach globally is not through its original design nor innovation, but in manufacturing. In the self-assured growing economy that India is today, how does this fundamentally change us from the 1980s? The only form of cultural export that seems to have caught the world’s imagination en masse is Bollywood.

Within the country, a group of artists and cultural practitioners are informalized in a tiny urban cultural elite. In almost 70 years of independence, this community has not been able to come together to work with the government to increase funding for the arts and culture. Its members are quick to take to the streets to protest against the state, but are unable to organize themselves to create a policy framework that could help thousands more like them earn a livelihood through the arts. They are increasingly invited to curate international biennales, but won’t ever be seen in their neighbourhood resident welfare meetings to discuss garbage disposal. They hectically assert their hierarchies through levels of political bravado on social media, but their collective following on tools such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram lags well behind that of any major fashion designer.

No self-appointed cultural practitioner has been able to create a successful conversation with the government on cultural matters, and both funding for the arts and its role in shaping civic-society discourse (which was at its height in the post-Babri Masjid scenario) are today at their lowest.

In this scenario, new cultural icons are those who can straddle, equally, the worlds of fashion and cinema. The fashion designer Manish Malhotra has a larger following on Instagram than perhaps everyone in the entire art world put together! International editions of fashion magazines frequently feature celebrities from the Hindi film industry; fashion designers covet such stars as clients, the latter’s endorsements on social media giving the designers instant visibility; the stars walking on runways for these designers’ fashion shows gathering them more media compared to designers for whom they don’t; some stars have even started their own fashion brands.

Given their huge popularity, it must be asked then, what is the idea of India that emerges from their work? Does this contain the real aspirations of the millions of India’s population? And, at a time when the country seems to be caught up in some of its most tectonic cultural changes, what could constitute notions of their own roles here? In recent histories, such influences on fashion and dress have come from sources outside of film: Gandhi and khadi; the hippie movement and floral prints; Communism and the jhola. Will the next fashion revolution come from within, then, or from elsewhere?

 

* Mayank Mansingh Kaul guest edited ‘Take on Art Design’ (2012) and the Marg issue, ‘Cloth and India, 1947-2015’, (2016).