As we catch our breath between the incessant fashion weeks in India, I find myself wondering when our fashion will finally get its due internationally. Remember the time before Sir Salman won the Booker and India was still the ingénue at the international literary ball? Indian fashion seems to be on the verge of its own Midnight Moment.
What would you say if I told you that some of those ethereal couture gowns worn on the Oscar red carpet and other international big ticket affairs had been made in little rooms in Mumbai’s backstreets by communities of Muslim craftsmen hailing from UP and Howrah? And we’re not talking about a panel of embroidery here, or a sprinkling of sequins there. We’re talking the whole nine yards — or more specifically — the whole 24 metres as was the case of the champagne-coloured Jenny Pakham silk tulle dress worn by Miley Cyrus at Oscar 2010.
It was made at my friend Chhitra Gidwani’s workshop in one of Mumbai’s industrial workshops. Chhitra is part of India’s remarkable (and unsung) rise up the international fashion food chain from high street to haute couture.
Remember the Seventies? When the world was awash with Indian crepe cotton and fortunes were founded on peasant blouses and gingham skirts? That was the first step. Then came the ready-to-wear boom. After a decade of earning their spurs on bleeding madras, Indian exporters began to secure orders from big name American designers such as Donna Karan, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta to produce their ready-to-wear lines. Out went the crepe cottons and in came the chiffons and georgettes. Step two: a foot in the designer door.
Trust the luuvies who lunch to secure the third perch. It was a claque of ferociously posh madams in Mumbai and Delhi who began to take embroidery orders for haute couture lines. Lucrative work and opportunities for air-kissing Lacroix, but strip away the glamour and India was still the beading lady in the backroom.
Then a few years ago, international designers discovered that there were also a few suppliers who could be entrusted with the sourcing, patterning, cutting and stitching — in fact the execution of entire dresses for their couture lines. “Couture dresses are made in limited numbers. Usually each design could be made in one to 50 of a kind, and around 30 embroiderers work on a single dress,” says Chhitra, who also made the Jenny Pakham dress Sandra Bullock wore to this year’s Golden Globes.
By convention, they are retailed for eight times what the Indian supplier is paid.
The last couple of years, India has seen a rise in such couture production which has found its way onto the Oscar red carpet, the aesthetic criteria of fashion’s night out.
But don’t bring out the bubbly. Indian fashion’s Booker moment will come not by creating an outfit which bears the name of a foreign designer but when Indian talent steps under its own label. (But given the relentless way in which international couture designers market themselves to the stars, it’s an uphill climb.) So far it has happened only on a couple of Oscar outings — when Dame Judi Dench (M in the Bond flicks) donned Abu Sandeep.
I ask Chhitra if her embroiders and tailors were chuffed about Bullock wearing the dress they’d worked on. “They didn’t know who she is,” she says, “so we had to explain by saying she’s their Aishwarya Rai.”
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com
