Call out that ugly duckling

Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week autumn/winter 2008 will soon be under way. And after that the Lakme Fashion Week will commence. The media will cover the weeks with a frenzy that earlier was reserved for big political events like the general elections.

The interest is welcome but the kind of copy that fashion weeks normally generate is normally pap. And one of the reasons for this is that fashion designers, as a collective, do not like being told that they are anything other than superlative.

If, god forbid, someone dares suggest that there could be anything wrong in the fashion paradise, that journalist/critic is more likely than not to be hung, drawn and quartered.

But what designers fail to realise is that it's critical writing that will help them get the critical mass eventually. It's when someone "" anyone "" stands up and points out what is wrong with an individual or a fraternity that corrective action can be taken. And it shouldn't take a room full of Einsteins to realise that course correction can only be beneficial.

Given that the fashion industry in India is still in its infancy, there is the need to welcome well-researched articles that critique rather than mindlessly praise. No one who is intimately connected with it should overlook this fact even if Indian designers may have won accolades in many parts of the world.

Till bottomlines of at least the top 20 designers do not touch a healthy figure (at least each designer should do a turnover of Rs 100 crore plus), the industry cannot afford to sit back and look forward to enjoying their own press releases reproduced as bylined copy in some of the best publications of the country.

The conspiracy of silence that hangs like a wet blanket on the press corp that covers the fashion week needs to be lifted this time. Now or never should be the signal that both the Fashion Design Council of India and individual designers need to send out this March.

It can only help and fresh voices that are able to articulate in a thought-provoking manner will help the events as well as make copy a lot more readable than telling readers mindnumbingly stupid stuff like yellow is the colour of the season or blue was so yesterday. Actually, PR-driven fashion-writing is so yesterday.

The FDCI, as a run-up to WLIFW, did have a day long workshop for the fashion press. Kudos to that but here's another suggestion for Rathi Vinay Jha and Sumeet Nair who helm FDCI right now: how about awarding the best piece/story (print/TV/web) that says something substantial and even critical about those collections that deserve it (and everytime there are more than enough such collections that need to be censured)? Somebody's got to call an ugly duckling ugly. Only by doing that can fashion grow up to a beautiful and profitable swan.