Fashion facts are facts too

STYLE

There has been, for a while, this mythical entity called the fashion police which is supposed to decapacitate anyone committing a major fashion crime like wearing bell bottoms when clearly skinny jeans is the garment of the moment.

The time has now come for a new role for the fashion police: catch offending and patently incorrect reporting on all matters of fashion. As the fashion industry has caught the fancy of editors and channel owners, a story on fashion seems to be de rigueur.

But at the same time the prevailing thought on such stories seem to be that a nodding acquaintance with facts should do just fine. Why apply journalistic rigour to fashion? The story and, more important, those who consume these stories are fluff.

This attitude I noticed recently with a leading British media organisation's website. This hoary British institution thought nothing of doing a story on Indian fashion where almost every fact was wrong, not to mention the conclusion the reporter reached based on her own erroneous reporting. Would this media outfit dare make as many mistakes if the story was on, say, Rwanda? Or even if it was reporting on the way the Indian Sensex was behaving?

When I contacted a senior editor in that organisation incensed by the story (not on anyone's behalf but because it showed how lightly fashion is treated) and pointed out the errors, the response I got was that, "You seem to be passionate about fashion."

Actually I am passionate about good reporting and writing. And shouldn't we all be if we have chosen to be in this profession?

For all those ready with the argument that fashion isn't on the same scale of importance as Rwanda or the Sensex, let me ask here: do media entities think that accurate reporting should only be restricted to "big" stories? And if fashion isn't big enough for these media organisations, why bother with it at all? Will people stop watching/buying a media product if all fashion reporting is stopped?

If the answer to that last question is yes, then there cannot be any excuse for sloppy and incorrect fashion reporting and writing in India at this moment. Some who love to dismiss the entire fashion jamboree as just wasteful eye candy and not worthy of serious journalistic attention then need to take the call of not filling airtime/newsprint with fashion stories just because a fashion week is in progress.

These are the very same people who trot out the argument of many worthwhile stories like hunger, poverty, etcetera that plague India and need to be highlighted prominently...well dump the half-assed reportage on fashion weeks and let hunger dominate your media outlet.

How can there ever be any excuse for grossly inaccurate reporting on any subject? The underlying premise of a media outlet is to provide facts of any story (big, small, tiny, minuscule) correctly.

And even if a rookie has been sent to report on fashion, as is often the case, and is completely ignorant of fashion, the least he/she can and should do is get the facts straight even if he/she misses the naunces, background "" but get the damn facts right, for god's sake!

Indian fashion designers have for a long time lamented in private about the kind of stories that fashion journalists do and in the early days of fashion in India I still defended my tribe. But after almost 20 years of fashion here, there is no excuse left for the kind of tripe that gets bandied about as fashion reporting.

During fashion week, with the kind of massive press attendance, one would be forgiven for thinking that fashion as a story is bigger than the aforementioned Rwanda. And the media attendance is getting bigger and bigger.

Media outfits need to decide if fashion is their thing and if it is, then devote the kind of people that can actually get the right content out, the right story out. Facts, I have to say, always stay in fashion.