In the throes of Lakme Fashion Week 2015 in Mumbai, I find myself thinking of how an enduring brand property can be created out of virtually nothing. When the bi-annual fashion event was launched back in 1999, even the most progressive amongst us were sceptical.
Indian fashion till then had been regarded as the purview of the colourfully crazy but temperamental designers, vain women and bored housewives. Lakme, on the other hand, was that dowdy but worthy Tata subsidiary, launched in the wake of nationalist fervour in 1952 - when, concerned that Indian women were wasting too much foreign exchange buying imported cosmetics, the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru requested JRD Tata to start an indigenous manufacturer. (HLL would acquire it in 1996).
Until then, no one in India had made the connection between fashion and cosmetics - certainly not frumpy (but well made, nevertheless) cosmetics named after the Goddess Lakshmi or a French opera star, depending on which story you believed.
At that time, as editor of the city's leading glam supplement, I recall going to the first fashion week held at the Taj's banquet rooms with curiosity laced with good humour. "The fashion people are up to something serious - they are talking of building their business into a legitimate industry, a money-spinner," I thought. "They say it has huge potential," I wondered, "but will it last?"
More than a decade later, I am happy to see that I have to eat my words. Take the last two shows I've attended the past week: the Lakme Fashion Week curtain-raiser by Kolkata-based designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee for Lakme Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2015 presented at Byculla's Richardson and Cruddas Mill and Manish Malhotra's the 'Blue Runway' collection in association with Wevolve and the World Bank at the Great Eastern Mills the next day.
Agreed, both designers are known to be among the most successful in India with businesses that boast very healthy bottom lines. Agreed that both have become brand names in their own right, commanding immense influence on society and Bollywood. Even so, both shows were extremely well upholstered by any standard. The mandatory clutch of Bollywood actresses-patrons; the slew of society divas and city leaders in the front rows; the precise operations; the concentric circles of PROs; impossibly long-legged Indian and international models; the flutes of pink champagne; the serious institutional buyers from the overseas; the army of photographers and fashion writers, bloggers and groupies - all of it a paean to how business, if it is nurtured well, can evolve into a viable industry, with jobs for all.
Of course, Lakme Fashion Week cannot claim responsibility for spurring India's fashion industry that was expected to have become a Rs 750-crore business by 2012. For that, the grit and talent of individual designers like the pioneering late Rohit Khosla, Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla and Tarun Tahiliani, the Fashion Design Council of India, Bollywood's Manish Malhotra, Karan Johar and Yash Raj Films must count too. But when fashion India's history is recorded, surely a long chapter will be dedicated to how Lakme Fashion Week helped consolidate the industry.
But more than anything, think of how Lakme Fashion Week helped transform the image of Lakme. Today, with designers creating special ranges for the cosmetic giant - from hair product manufacturers predicting ranges on the basis of Lakme Fashion Week to the unprecedented media coverage it garners from the association - no one will ever think of Lakme as anything but a high fashion, premium brand.
I guess that's how an enduring brand property can be created out of virtually nothing!
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasmumbai@gmail.com
