The client showed a degree of incredulity when I ended up mentioning that India is now already creating a new class of very affluent customers who would be willing to indulge in an upscale lifestyle, both professional and personal.
However, this group exhibits very different characteristics and would not be seen on the ubiquitous page-3, or have certain surnames, or belong to any particular community.
Most of this week, the print and the electronic media are yet again full of the annual tamasha known as India Fashion Week.
Anyone who might be visiting India from the West could easily be bewildered if she were to do some channel surfing on TV and find that even the "news channels" are carrying out a "live coverage" of what otherwise would be a non-event if one were to acknowledge the fact that even today, the annual size of the so-called designer industry in India is less than what a single clothing retailer like Gap (US) sells in all of two days!
Through this media circus, one gets to find out who the visitors are at this show, which easily explains why this industry remains still-born in India: almost everyone seems to be involved in this extravaganza except the potential customers, i.e. retailers who could possibly buy some of the collections for national or international markets.
Earlier in the week, at an international textile and clothing congress in Mumbai, one of the presentations highlighted how the world consumption of textile and clothing products is already undergoing a fundamental shift and why major global producers should actually focus on emerging large markets within Asia itself rather than only look at the traditional US, EU and Japanese markets.
Within the next 15 years, four major consuming (Asian) countries/groupings would be buying more such products than the US and the EU put together
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