Fashion's moment in the sun

SOCIETY

EVEN THOUGH THE Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week is over, I am still in an excitable state. The reason for this is that fashion is getting its due in India.

Though fashion has been around for over 15-20 years "" in the way we understand it now, replete with fashion shows and defining looks for each season "" the industry has been dismissed as being frivolous and there was more style than substance (some argued that even the style part was questionable) to it. Now even Outlook magazine, which once carried a cover story rubbishing the industry, is forced to acknowledge that fashion is "no longer a joke".

One good indicator that the industry has moved away from a point in time when only those who had some amount of reasonable family wealth or infrastructure backing (for instance, if the designer's family was already into garment exports, it made it easy to get started) got into this profession. This made the base of people who joined this profession quite narrow and naysayers were quick to target that aspect.

But at the recently concluded spring/summer showing at WIFW there was a rich picking of new talent whose work shows that fashion is now a profession that the young aspire to. I was particularly impressed with Zubair Kirmani who is from Kashmir and is now based in Delhi (Noida, to be precise) and has a great sense of aesthetics and texturing of fabric.

Though this wasn't his first outing at WIFW, I would still classify him as a new designer and as someone who comes from a middle class background, Kirmani is indicative of the broadbasing of fashion.

Varun Sardana is another designer who impressed at WIFW. Having graduated from NIFT, Sardana debuted this time and his collection showed that he will go a long way. A prize that the FDCI announced for the two most promising designers included Sardana.

There were others whose work is noteworthy (and then there were some who weren't even though they were hyped beyond belief), beside these two. At the same time, the seniors in the business like Rohit Bal, Raghuvendra Rathore, Rajesh Pratap Singh, Tarun Tahiliani during the event and J J Valaya and Ashish Soni off site, showed collections that are worthy of praise.

All this augurs well for the industry. The more talent that chooses fashion, over other creative pursuits every season, the more it proves the point that this is a full-fledged industry in its own right rather than a niche gathering of a bunch of rich socialites with good back-end support from well-off families.

And those who have questioned fashion's relevance and accused it of being a small part in the lives of just the rich and the famous, the story of fashion designer Samant Chauhan, as chronicled in this paper last week, shows that children growing up in the hinterland of this country are beginning to dream of career choices that go beyond the conventional middle class ones of being either a doctor or an engineer and there are parents in these parts who have understood that its okay to do so.

The principal reason for this is that you can now make a very comfortable living as a fashion designer. Then there is all the press that has the potential of making you into a recognised face (at least your neighbours and relatives will know you and treat you a lot better.

This kind of fame also helps at getting good service in tony restaurants). Not bad and vastly different had the choice of careers led these people into, say, being an accountant. The money wouldn't have been bad at all but life would have been faceless and dull and grey. And in fashion, grey can never be the new black or to put it differently, grey avoidable, black desirable.