Are Indian fashion designers embarrassed of their heritage? I am prompted to ask this question after discovering that Ma Ke has become the first Chinese designer to be invited to show her work on the sidelines of the Paris Haute Couture Week, the real McCoy in the world of fashion. This honour came her way after showing at the Paris Fashion Week just once. No homegrown Indian fashion designer has yet been chosen to show at the haute couture week.
Ma Ke found favour with Didier Grumbach, president of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (who was wooed assiduously by Indian designers when he came visiting the Wills India Fashion Week in 2007), for her use of her Chinese heritage, interpreted in a modern way. Ma Ke, for instance, uses a traditional loom that dates back to the 19th century to weave fabric for her collection.
When Indian designers were first setting up shop, their biggest complaint was the unavailability in India of the international mill-made fabrics that they felt were best for their kind of designs. Few made the effort to plumb the depths of Indian textile traditions to give shape to their designs — notable exceptions being Abraham & Thakore, Ritu Kumar, Neeru Kumar of Tulsi and many NID-trained textile designers-turned-fashion designers.
A decade or two later, there are still only a handful of Indian designers who have been able to crack this. Indian textiles still don’t find favour with Indian designers and international buyers at the fashion weeks have often complained of this lack of Indian identity (an overabundance of zardozi isn’t really cutting-edge Indian identity). But many of our designers still remain clueless about how to solve this conundrum and fashion week after fashion week throws up more design confusion rather than a solution.
China had the Cultural Revolution and 60 years of the Mao suit. India, on the other hand, only had socialism, the effects of which weren’t as pernicious as either the Cultural Revolution or the Mao suit. Why then is it that a relatively young Chinese designer — she graduated in 1992 from the Suzhou Institute of Silk Textile Technology — is able to understand the nuances of her culture and accept and then adapt it for a modern audience so easily, while our designers find time for a lot else but making Indian fashion cutting-edge?
The answer probably lies in modern India’s inability to appreciate the unparalleled craft traditions that we still have. Would a BMW-driving socialite living in Jor Bagh find it in her heart to pay in multiples of lakhs for a bag made out of the finest khadi, even as she so easily pays for the plastic mass-produced so-called luxury handbag that has the right logo on it?
And our designers, instead of being change agents, are happy to feed this kind of client. The only reason for that can be that fashion designers here are still unable to accept their rich heritage and feel happy to tag their Indian collection as ethnic rather than proudly flaunt what can be their biggest strength, specially on the international stage. It’s time to stop being embarrassed of the riches that this country has to offer.
